Interview: Too much software

Posted Feb 12, 2008 7:49 UTC (Tue) by aleXXX (subscriber, #2742)
In reply to: Interview: Too much software by frazier
Parent article: Interview: Mark "Markey" Kretschmann (Not the Gentoo Weekly News)

My main system runs Slackware, which is somewhat smaller than other 
distros (and has the best dependency checking - none :-)

Anyway, every box should have Ruby installed ;-)

Alex

Interview: Too much software

Posted Feb 12, 2008 8:57 UTC (Tue) by frazier (guest, #3060) [Link]

Every box should not have Ruby installed.

The thing that bothers me most is the end users. Lots of people, thousands of people, are going to have extra software they really shouldn't need installed because one guy likes it and made it a dependency. We're talking desktop here, and there's going to be a lot of people who aren't dealing with the guts of their system and will work with what, for most practical purposes, gets handed to them.

The decision of adding a library should have a barrier of entry higher than it currently has. Perhaps as Linux desktops pick up in popularity this will occur at the distro level. There's a threshold where it is worth the distro paying someone to rewrite out a dependency vs. the hit to user experience and load on update servers.

In this instance, the people who want added software the most are the ones most likely to be able to add it, and the far more common recipients (common users) are the ones who don't have the ability to remove it. Worse, the users far outnumber the developers. Ruby seems like a nice choice if the developer has the "I write this for me and if the rest of the world wants it I'll share" mindset, but if he's genuinely looking at the end users, adding an unneeded dependency is a selfish act.