Regina and THE

[Jeff Spaleta]

On Tue, 26 Oct 2004 13:18:57 +0200, Karsten Hopp <karsten at redhat.com> wrote:
> THE is a text editor similar to xedit which runs on s390/s390x z/VM.
> If you think vi's or emacs UI is cryptic, try out THE and you'll be happy with
> vi (or emacs) again. We ship it as a convinience for the z/VM administrators
> who are used to xedit, but you really don't want it if you're not one of them.
> I'm not sure about Regina, is anyone really interested in Rexx anymore ?
> It is a requirement for THE and quite common on mainframes, but thats it.
> In the Linux world Perl and Python are way more common, there's no need to
> learn another interpreter language.

Questions about the sanity of a user who likes using Rexx on x86
hardware aside for the moment.  There are significant long term
ramifications for community "Extras" when dealing with situations
where "Core" package mantainers choose to not compile up an arch
because it would be considered unnecessary bloat.  This is going to
greatly complicate how "Extras" and "Core" packagers have to interact
without getting in the way of each other.  I'd rather have to avoid
any situation where a niche set of users have to compile up an arch
specfic "Extras" for functionality they like solely because Core's
package was delibrately built to exclude the arch without a specific
technical reason.  If it doesn't compile for the arch or if there is
clearly an arch specific tool because of its low level hardware access
nature like yaboot, thats different.  Maybe once the centralized
"Extras" walks out of the vapor, this issue will evaporate under the
light of new policy and the workings of the centralized build system,
but maybe it won't. In any case, avoiding situations where community
will want to compile up Core packages for specific excluded arches
would be one less core/community packager complexity.

-jef