Checkbox for "Install Everything"

[Les Mikesell]

Les wrote:
> On Sun, 2007-05-20 at 18:26 -0500, Les Mikesell wrote:
>>  "Everything" doesn't mean everything 
>> available, it means everything someone familiar with the whole distro 
>> would expect to be useful or the best of several choices.  The point is 
>> that someone assembling the distribution is in a much better position to 
>> make this selection than someone just doing the install.
>>
> Bear in mind that you are speaking about 3,000,000 +/- folks in
> countries all over the world.  From PhD's to Gradeschoolers or some with
> little or no formal education at all.

Yes, if it was easy it wouldn't be an issue.  It isn't - and aside from 
the fact that you don't want your install choice to limit what people 
can do on the machine, no one but the people building the distribution 
know what new things are available and how useful they might be. 
They've already had to make significant decisions about them to include 
them.

> I am a programmer.  I want all the programming utilities and libraries
> that I like and use, but I am also interested in historical languages.
> Would you want emacs, eclipse, the developers libraries, KICad, Gscheme,
> and various mathematical libraries?  Or perhaps the stuff I like related
> to navigation, GPS software, tide tables, Navigation tables, and current
> wind velocities in Southern California.  Also GnuCash, Nedit customized
> for PBasic, and AI software tools, forth, fortran, C, C++, COBOL, Forth,
> PASCAL, ADA, Tcl and Tk, and other tools like that.  Maybe my interests
> in other forms (which I haven't downloaded yet) chemistry,
> NanoTechnology, Robotics control algorithms, Stereo vision algorithms,
> Visual cue software, and other esoteric stuff I have some interests in.
> Bear in mind that many of these come with tutorials, manuals, and the AI
> and vision stuff have maps that are often many megabytes each, with
> hundreds making up a training set.

Suppose you were building a machine that more than one programmer would 
use, along with typical office stuff...  What would you include to keep 
them from wasting hours of time or calling you in the middle of the 
night to install something they need.  When those 'many megabytes' cost 
dollars instead of pennies they might have been a problem.  Now the main 
issue is that you don't have conflicts in the shared libraries.

> What woudl you define as "Everything", and what mechanisms would you
> recommend for the rest of us?

The old 'everything' worked fine as a starting point, but I haven't 
tracked all the newly available things - which is why I want someone 
else to pick.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com