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Easy choices!
Easy choices!
Posted Feb 24, 2005 5:07 UTC (Thu) by ncm (subscriber, #165)Parent article: How would you shrink Fedora?
I'm astonished that this made the headlines. *Obviously* the Java stuff should go; there's practically no Free software in Java, other than what is used to write more (evidently proprietary) Java. The commercial packages always come with their own JVM and libraries anyway, because they only work with that exact version, propaganda notwithstanding. ("Write once, run hardly anywhere"?)
Similarly, *obviously* sendmail(?!) and probably exim should go, leaving postfix. Likewise, emacs, leaving xemacs. Likewise, most of the games, perhaps leaving solitaire. The old "games help people who are afraid of computers" argument lost all meaning long ago. Likewise, much of both Gnome *and* KDE, and Xfce. (Should Perl and all its baggage go? Don't tempt me!) Keep epiphany, abiword, and gnumeric, though; competition helps there.
Show me a list of the packages, and I'll bet I could get it down to three discs easily without anybody missing anything useful -- maybe even two. Bloat, thy name is Fedora (... and Suse, and MS, and Mac. There's more than enough blame to go around).
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Easy choices!
Posted Feb 24, 2005 7:38 UTC (Thu) by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501) [Link]
Those are free software packages. And the "JVM" in question is probably gcj which was free last time I checked.
Anyway, as much as I dislike sendmail, dropping it would upset many long-time users of it. Besides, it won't save you that much space. And anyway, what about the competition?
Easy choices!
Posted Feb 25, 2005 0:49 UTC (Fri) by syndicate (guest, #27535) [Link]
It is my personal opinion that they should get over it and move on to a simplified and less-hackable MTA.
Apache Jakarta and related projects
Posted Feb 24, 2005 7:58 UTC (Thu) by davidw (subscriber, #947) [Link]
There is a lot of free Java at the Apache Software Foundation, and there are efforts under way to make sure it works with free java.
Easy choices!
Posted Feb 24, 2005 8:04 UTC (Thu) by eru (subscriber, #2753) [Link]
One principle could be that when there are more than one program doing the same thing with very similar feature set, leave the smaller. That way at least some "religious wars" would get a rational resolution. Eg. which is smaller, emacs or xemacs? This cannot however solve things like the emacs-vs-vi war, since someone used to emacs finds vi too hard to use, and vice versa.The biggest source of wasted space is obviously including both GNOME and KDE (and their respective versions of accessories): both are very large systems doing much the same thing. All other redundancy removal opportunities pale beside this. But this may be a emacs-vs-vi kind of thing: leaving one out would cause many users to leave Fedora.
Easy choices!
Posted Feb 24, 2005 9:42 UTC (Thu) by Tet (subscriber, #5433) [Link]
*obviously* sendmail(?!) and probably exim should go, leaving postfix.Obvious to you, perhaps. From my perspective, you could easily lose exim and postfix, but sendmail must stay. Different people have different requirements, which is why the task of pruning things like this is so difficult. I could easily accept losing OO.o, for example -- abiword and gnumeric are better applications with more long term potential anyway. But many people would disagree with me.
Easy choices!
Posted Feb 24, 2005 10:13 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
Besides, MTAs are tiny, and changing away from them is really hard: they're just about the last packages one should consider dropping.
Easy choices!
Posted Feb 24, 2005 17:49 UTC (Thu) by epithumia (subscriber, #23370) [Link]
They're canning Exim because it's so well documented that the documentation takes up too much space.
Easy choices!
Posted Feb 24, 2005 16:53 UTC (Thu) by tjc (subscriber, #137) [Link]
I could easily accept losing OO.o, for example -- abiword and gnumeric are better applications with more long term potential anyway.I am also sorry to see abiword and gnumeric go, since both are stable and (relatively) lightweight alternatives to OO.o. My disappointment is tempered by the fact that I don't actually use Fedora Core anymore.
Perhaps OO.o should be on a disc of its own. It's huge, and either you use it or you don't.
Easy choices!
Posted Feb 25, 2005 0:54 UTC (Fri) by syndicate (guest, #27535) [Link]
<i>Obvious to you, perhaps. From my perspective, you could easily lose exim and postfix, but sendmail must stay.</i>
Pray tell, why would you still use sendmail?
Easy choices!
Posted Feb 24, 2005 20:00 UTC (Thu) by nicku (subscriber, #777) [Link]
Likewise, emacs, leaving xemacsEasy now! :-)
Easy choices!
Posted Feb 24, 2005 22:34 UTC (Thu) by b7j0c (subscriber, #27559) [Link]
Not sure how your reconcile eliminating "much of Gnome" but leaving in Epiphany.
In any case there is a browser that 99% of Fedora users are using, you know what it is and it should be included to the exclusion to the other browsers that people do not use.
Easy choices!
Posted Mar 1, 2005 15:17 UTC (Tue) by coolian (guest, #14818) [Link]
"Similarly, *obviously* sendmail(?!) and probably exim should go, leavingpostfix. Likewise, emacs, leaving xemacs. Likewise, most of the games,
perhaps leaving solitaire. The old "games help people who are afraid of
computers" argument lost all meaning long ago. Likewise, much of both
Gnome *and* KDE, and Xfce. (Should Perl and all its baggage go? Don't
tempt me!) Keep epiphany, abiword, and gnumeric, though; competition
helps there.
I use emacs, not xemacs. So do about 12 trillion people.
Games take up almost no room, so leave them, and yes, it DOES encourage
people to use...
Snore on you saying that about Gnome and KDE. Perl should stay. What are
you going to be doing with this box? Playing porn in FLuxbox?
"Show me a list of the packages, and I'll bet I could get it down to
three discs easily without anybody missing anything useful -- maybe even
two. Bloat, thy name is Fedora (... and Suse, and MS, and Mac. There's
more than enough blame to go around)."
You are boring.