Distribution quotes of the week [LWN.net]

I remember the time before free software distros like Fedora: it was chaotic, with messes of bundles and contradictory dependencies from all over the place, with no reliable tools for finding things.

-- Andrew Haley

A. Things that I care about keeping up to date are always moving too slowly.

B. Things that I care about keeping stable are always moving too quickly.

C. Things that I don't care about shouldn't bother me by having bugs, security holes, changes in interface or functionality, or security updates.

D. And, for every value of "I", each set of _things_ is unique.

-- Matthew Miller

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Distribution quotes of the week

Posted Sep 18, 2015 2:38 UTC (Fri) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link] (1 responses)

I want to add one thing to that list: “Things that I don't care about shouldn't have a mountain of mandatory dependencies.”

Not me personally, though I could easily rattle off a list of examples. This comes after seeing a few R end-users bemoaning an upstream for throwing pandoc into its code; while it's a pretty neat piece of software, installing one hundred and two other things (by my count) for the sake of a syntax highlighting feature or whatnot doesn't sound so fun.

Distribution quotes of the week

Posted Sep 24, 2015 15:11 UTC (Thu) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

:-)

I remember the kernel! of all things having a mandatory dependency on ISDN. That pulled in 6MB of ISDN maintenance tools. Not much? At that time my entire disk space was - iirc - a single 650MB drive. (That was SuSE, way back when ...)

Losing 1% of my disk space to a bunch of tools to manage hardware I didn't even have was rather painful ...

Cheers,
Wol