PROPOSAL: Core redefinition

[Leonard den Ottolander]

Hello Andy,

> But if the plan is to create this Core / Extras 
> discontiguity anyway, and now RH seriously considers to move KDE into the 
> ghetto, then this is "shrinking the core distribution".

The fact that Red Hat has *not* yet proposed such a move has stopped me
from starting to shout very loudly about this issue. The only RH
employee who has supported such a move afaict is Warren, but that was
his personal opinion.

I am also not a great proponent of a substantial reduction of Core. Like
Jos I think a distro should be somewhat complete wrt the packages
offered. Of course removing stale packages is a good idea. But I am
afraid the redundancy in Core is not of such extend that Core can be
reduced substantially.

I find the suggestion to remove KDE from Core ridiculous, as it affects
a significant part of the user base. A rather arrogant proposal from a
few Gnome centered people. Maybe I should suggest to keep KDE in Core
and move Gnome to Extras in return. Note that I am rather neutral on
which of those desktops is the best. I've been using Gnome the last
couple of months, but before I used KDE on a regular basis. I think
there is place for both in Core, as well as for one or two of the
lightweight desktop environments/window managers.

> Basically, my suggestion is that "core" should be the minimum userspace stuff 
> around the kernel that is needed in almost all scenarios.  Everything else is 
> in Extras, or you can make another repo layer Fedora GDesktop which is 
> Core+Xorg+Gnome.

As you might understand I disagree. The current size of Core is fine
with me. People with concerns about downloading too much stuff when
using the ISOs should investigate a bit on dependencies and download
just the packages they need for and install from HD or via NFS. Or do an
FTP installation using your local mirror.

Leonard.

-- 
mount -t life -o ro /dev/dna /genetic/research