PROPOSAL: Core size reduction "bug day"

[Florian La Roche]

> I'm not in favour of discussing what packages to move out of Core at
> this time.  But "debating the possibility" *and the desirability* sounds
> good provided we derive something concrete from it rather than just
> another "good idea gets bandied about and found to have holes that no
> one ever bothers to address" session.  In particular: let's discuss what
> infrastructure and policy clarifications are prerequisites to changing
> how comprehensive core is.

Everything in core should stay modular enough. E.g. we want to support
several MTAs. This should be sendmail, postfix and exim for now.
We should now be able to have only one of them installed or install several
of them at the same point and only run one of them via alternatives.

All this needs time to hash out the corner cases and for quite some time
you _always_ had to install sendmail and you could only install another MTA
and switch to it via "alternatives", but not de-install sendmail. That is/was
too limited.

Similar I think the system should be pre-pared for more "desktops". I think
xfce-integration should help this a lot. Are all the corner cases working,
it is easy to setup and run it without touching too many config files?

For many of these items you only start doing the full work if the relevant
packages are also in Fedora Core. This might change in the future if the
integration across rpm repositories goes away, but for now "Fedora Core"
is exactly the boundary of what people will look at.

It is about "integration and then again making things modular" that makes
a distribution very good. To some extend this contradicts the "only keep
one version that is fully supported" in the source base, but e.g. for the
MTA issue I don't think we can only select one. Same is true for
gnome/KDE/xfce. I often switch again to icewm, that one is really nice, too.

greetings,

Florian La Roche