Fedora Core 2 wishlists

[Karl DeBisschop]

On Tue, 2003-12-09 at 14:45, Bill Nottingham wrote:
> 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...

Long term, yes. Maybe in the short term, facilitating the transition is
part of what open source OSs have to do. I don't really know...


> > or running a single server with multiple versions of PostgreSQL
> > installed.
> 
> This sounds more like a parallel install situation:
> 
>   http://ometer.com/parallel.html

It is, and that part is well thought out by the PostgreSQL packagers.
And in principle is not really different than what is in the link above.
(Actually, the whole think is well thought out on their part - I don't
mean to be cutting anyone's work down).

What the link above ignores is some way to manage the parallel install,
both from the sysadmin's point of view, and from the user's point of
view. And it's my contention, that it is all about choosing apps,
whether by mime type, or by user preference, or by sysadmin fiat. So at
that level, it seems like the same problem to me.

What irks me is that they are going to some effort to essentially
reimplement alternatives because the need to do what alternaives does
both in system settings and in per-user settings. (Actually, it is a
little more complex than that).

Now if the viewpoint is that alternatives will not be there, then I
guess that's fine. It's what you have to do. But if it is already there,
then doing it a different way all over again seems a waste. But I guess
that's the way it'll be.

-- 
Karl DeBisschop <kdebisschop at alert.infoplease.com>
Pearson Education/Information Please