Fedora and RedHat's autism toward personal users

[Sean Middleditch]

On Mon, 2003-10-13 at 03:52, Alan Cox wrote:
> > There is nothing wrong with having dozens of web servers in an
> > "everything for web serving" repository but in Fedora Core that is
> > another thing: because of the drawbacks I mentioned you have to think in
> > how useful are the features of teh additional program, how many people
> > BADLY need them, how active is the maintenance of the program.  And once
> > you have thought about it you have to think again and again.
> 
> Linux is a program and not a collection. It does include lots of sound
> drivers, lots of disk drivers etc because there is a need to.
> 
> To take another example - which should we throw out of fedora core
> vi or emacs .... Clearly the answer is neither.

I'm not sure vi or emacs are good examples for this.  We're talking
largely about over-lapping need.  Need is defined in many ways - I
*need* my web server to support auth over LDAP, SSL, PHP/CGI, virtual
domains, etc.  My text editor, on the other hand, I *need* to use vi
interface, since that's what I've used for almost 10 years now, and its
near impossible for me to get work done in emacs.  The reason to use vi
vs emacs or pico or gedit or whatnot is based on the interface feature,
*not* the actual capabilities - in this case, there is no overlap in
needs.  We could also say that since we have cat, we shouldn't offer any
text editors - problem is, the feature sets between cat and vi (or any
"text editor") are *very* different.  Overlap might be offering several
versions of vi (like Debian), not in offering vi plus other editors with
completely different interface designs and target audiences.

When we start talking about gedit vs jedit vs kate vs gnotepad vs
textedit and so on, now we're talking more or less identical programs;
offering two GUI text editors that do the almost exact same thing with
almost the exact same interface is pretty goofy.

> 
> I do broadly agree with you however. In the case of apache we have a 
> web server which does everything in the generic web serving space.
> 
> 
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-- 
Sean Middleditch <elanthis at awesomeplay.com>
AwesomePlay Productions, Inc.