Board efforts: scope, concept, and permission?

[Przemek Klosowski]

On 02/03/2010 11:46 AM, Jesse Keating wrote:
> On Wed, 2010-02-03 at 11:23 -0500, Przemek Klosowski wrote:
>> I don't understand why 'Electronic Design Lab' is a separate spin: if I
>> install all the EDA-related packages that it contains, would I not get
>> an equivalent capability?
>>
>> The only reason I can think of is the media capacity limitation, which
>> forces dropping some packages to make space for someone's desired set
>> which is not already part of the mainstream collection.
>
> There is also the issue of multiple providers of a given functionality.
> When all are present, an algorithm tries to pick the "best" provider,
> which may not make sense to a human, but every human is different.  By
> breaking up the large package set into a smaller subset, one can short
> circuit that "best" selection by only having one provider for that given
> functionality.

What do you mean by 'functionality'? Is it what's provided by an RPM 
package? This would suggest that packages in spins would be functionally 
different---which is a little uncomfortable to me, because how can I 
ever know that I have the best version of every tool? To make sure I 
would have to try all the tools from all the spins, in principle.

>
> FEL exists for the reason you stated above, but also as a marketing
> tool, as it is very easy to install from a Live image, you had somebody
> a disk and say "install this, you'll have an electronics lab".  Much
> easier than handing them a stack of DVDs and saying "Start this install,
> select this package here, this group there, remove this package here,
> format accordingly, and hopefully you got all the right selections
> done".

I have a generic Fedora install with an 'Electronics' tab in the 
'Applications' menu. I got it after I selected it from the Engineering 
section in the yumex GUI, I believe. This is preferable to me, as 
compared to installing a separate spin.

I can see a psychological difference here. I am used to having one 
computer on which I do everything, from watching youtube videos to 
designing PCBs, rather than several computers for specialized tasks.
Maybe the kids today see it differently :).