Fedora and RedHat's autism toward personal users

[Paul Gear]

Sean Middleditch wrote:
> ...
> and 5) over-engineering in the distro to accomodate all these
> alternatives.  Debian had several sick sub-systems for handling 3
> versions of the 'more' command, alnog with the obscene number of
> versions of apps for web browsing, mail, help, compilers, awks, seds,
> tars, etc.  This is because those alternatives weren't addons or
> replacements, but in fact parts of the OS itself; i.e., the OS wasn't
> built for, say, Mozilla for browsing, or any of the other browsers as an
> optional add-on, but instead was built for *any* browser at all.  The
> configuration, package management, and existance of sub-systems like the
> 'alternatives' section just shows how much work went into dealing with a
> sub-optimal situation.

A web browser is quite a bit different from a web server, or
tar/awk/more/etc.

You need to support a wide variety of browsers, because it is an
personal decision (i get really annoyed when i have to switch from
Galeon to anything), and you need to support multiple browsers per
system, since multiple people might different ones (at once on large
systems).

But you can only run one web server or mail server at once (at least on
the standard ports), and it makes sense to limit the number of this type
of packages.
-- 
Paul
http://paulgear.webhop.net

A: Because we read from top to bottom, left to right.
Q: Why should i start my reply below the quoted text?
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