On Fri, 2005-05-20 at 03:06, Rahul Sundaram wrote: > I think everyone would agree that having a single CD minimalistic > installation would be a good thing to do and the general trend is > towards that but its a question of balances and the definition of what > Fedora Core should be. Why is this question any harder to answer for fedora than for ubuntu? And why, since it has been answered already, shouldn't approximately the same answer be shared? > If you retain only the defaults in Fedora Core > what segment should it cover. Should it be just the basic tools on a > fuzzy definition of what consitutes the "Linux platform" ? should it be > server/desktop/ development oriented? I think ubuntu is correct in making separate Gnome/KDE versions. The idea should be that the one CD provides a complete working system for a large number of people while keeping the option of adding any other packages from the repositories for the unusual cases. People building servers probably know what they are doing and will want a custom setup anyway. The case to make easy is the desktop where the numbers are bigger and a lot of people are doing their first install and don't have any way to make choices even if you offer them. I've always thought that if there were somewhere around 20 expertly chosen (and maintained) complete sets of programs already bundled with descriptions of why you might want one set vs. another everyone would be a lot better off than having to sort through 10,000 choices that are just there because they are free. One thing that would be interesting, but probably not currently possible to determine with current repositories, would be to find out how many times individual programs were requested specifically (that is, where a user made the decision to install a package rather than pulling an update because it happened to be included in a base package). Some metrics along these lines would really help in finding out what people are using. -- Les Mikesell les@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
