In general, careless packaging like this means that custom installs, selecting packages by hand, are much less effective, since one has to install (and later upgrade/maintain) much more than he will ever use or need anyway. It means that more people are forced without a real reason to upgrade the hardware, just to store bytes that will never be used.
NOTE: Before trying to reply with any variation of the extremely un-Linuxish "Hardware is so cheap" myth, please read the FAQ of the project in my signature (hopefully coming to FC2 asap).
TIA, Marco Fioretti
My comments on this are in line with yours.
If you have to install a whole package to meet one dependency then we are starting to fall into the Microsoft trap of making applications depend on unwanted/unrequited applications. Any extra application can become a security issue that could allow a presently unknown type of attack. We see it almost every day in Windows.
If I am setting up a workstation for a secretary and I don't want to allow Internet browsing, why should I install Mozilla. If the address book code is required for OOo, then put the code in a separate package. I can understand the dependencies for libs but not for applications. How is the OOo download from OpenOffice.org handle this?
Yes yum seems to work well but from my experience not great. It is hard to find all the packages in some cases and for the added security, the package/site GPG-key.
One reason that I like Linux is the ability to install applications as required. Now I may want to install a simple workstation on an old computer and the dependencies could prevent me from doing this as the amount of diskspace required is to much, aka windows upgrades. This feature is one reason why some corporations are looking at Linux, ability to run on older hardware.
I also see a problem with someone that needs a newer feature than in the release or test package and must use the tar version or compile their selves. They could end up causing more problems than they know how to handle as Fedora does not follow the same directory paths as most applications do on their home site downloads. I have been stung by this one already.
-- Robin Laing
