Fedora Core 2 wishlists

[Bill Nottingham]

Karl DeBisschop (kdebisschop at alert.infoplease.com) said: 
> It does not extend to setting a system default MTA, for instance, that a
> user can choose to override. Or a system wide print system. Although I
> suppose there could be extensions...but MTAs and printers handle many
> mime types, most of which are also handled by some desktop viewer. So
> it's both mime type and context that determines the app that gets
> invoked.

Well, I'm coming from a different perspective. Basically....

Supporting two printing systems in the core OS is dumb. It's a waste
of development effort all around, and it was probably a mistake when
we did it. The way to a stable, mature, robust OS is to support one
solution that does it *right* in the general case. It's why I'm leery
of the sendmail/exim/postfix or wu-ftpd/vsftpd/pure-ftpd/proftpd
situation, and I think using alternatives for three flavors of vi is
extremely crazy.

Basically, in my opinion, spending a lot of time implementing an
infrastructure to support choosing between 6 web browsers is better
spent *fixing* one of the web browsers to support all of the
features you need.

> Nor does it let me choose a default RDBMS for users to access, whether
> it mysql or PostgreSQL,

It's not logical for this; they don't have the same interface in a way
that would be handled by alternatives.

> or running a single server with multiple versions of PostgreSQL
> installed.

This sounds more like a parallel install situation:

  http://ometer.com/parallel.html

Bill