fc5 goals

[Tom Lane]

Bernardo Innocenti <bernie at develer.com> writes:
> I agree on the basic philosophy, but I had irritating experiences with
> distros that try to be minimalist and forget to install an ftp client
> or development packages.
> You end up installing RPMs one by one for weeks before you can
> start being productive.

I just ran into a related issue today.  For quite some time, the
PostgreSQL community has been seeing sporadic reports of database
initialization failures that could only be explained by supposing
that 'setlocale(LC_MESSAGES, "")' returns NULL.  There can hardly
be any doubt that this behavior contravenes the spec:
http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/007908799/xsh/setlocale.html
but we'd seen it reported on more than one platform.  We found out
today that glibc, at least, fails in this way if the underlying
locale definition files are not installed.

Now, no one running Fedora or RHEL will ever see this failure, because
the required files are packaged in glibc-common ... but it seems that
SuSE, for one, puts those files in an optional package glibc-locale.
And glibc isn't able to behave sanely when glibc-locale isn't there.

The moral I draw is that subdividing stuff comes at a nontrivial
cost in making software able to function well in more and more
subtly different environments.  The above-described behavior is
not a bug for Red Hat's version of glibc, but I say that it damn
well is a bug for SuSE.  Do we want to go down that path?

			regards, tom lane