Les wrote:
On Sun, 2007-05-20 at 18:26 -0500, Les Mikesell wrote:
"Everything" doesn't mean everything
available, it means everything someone familiar with the whole distro
would expect to be useful or the best of several choices. The point is
that someone assembling the distribution is in a much better position to
make this selection than someone just doing the install.
Bear in mind that you are speaking about 3,000,000 +/- folks in
countries all over the world. From PhD's to Gradeschoolers or some with
little or no formal education at all.
Yes, if it was easy it wouldn't be an issue. It isn't - and aside from
the fact that you don't want your install choice to limit what people
can do on the machine, no one but the people building the distribution
know what new things are available and how useful they might be.
They've already had to make significant decisions about them to include
them.
I am a programmer. I want all the programming utilities and libraries
that I like and use, but I am also interested in historical languages.
Would you want emacs, eclipse, the developers libraries, KICad, Gscheme,
and various mathematical libraries? Or perhaps the stuff I like related
to navigation, GPS software, tide tables, Navigation tables, and current
wind velocities in Southern California. Also GnuCash, Nedit customized
for PBasic, and AI software tools, forth, fortran, C, C++, COBOL, Forth,
PASCAL, ADA, Tcl and Tk, and other tools like that. Maybe my interests
in other forms (which I haven't downloaded yet) chemistry,
NanoTechnology, Robotics control algorithms, Stereo vision algorithms,
Visual cue software, and other esoteric stuff I have some interests in.
Bear in mind that many of these come with tutorials, manuals, and the AI
and vision stuff have maps that are often many megabytes each, with
hundreds making up a training set.
Suppose you were building a machine that more than one programmer would
use, along with typical office stuff... What would you include to keep
them from wasting hours of time or calling you in the middle of the
night to install something they need. When those 'many megabytes' cost
dollars instead of pennies they might have been a problem. Now the main
issue is that you don't have conflicts in the shared libraries.
What woudl you define as "Everything", and what mechanisms would you
recommend for the rest of us?
The old 'everything' worked fine as a starting point, but I haven't
tracked all the newly available things - which is why I want someone
else to pick.
--
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell@xxxxxxxxx
