Fedora and RedHat's autism toward personal users

[Jean Francois Martinez]

On Sun, 2003-10-12 at 18:55, Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
> Le dim 12/10/2003 à 16:40, Jean Francois Martinez a écrit :
> 
> > BTW I am NOT for advocating for including every piece of cr.p, like
> > Debian does (in an ideal world Feddora would include only one program
> > for a task: the best one, in real world it is more complex) and I am
> > quite conscious that it is not possible to cover every need in world. 
> 
> Just allow only well-packaged software in the repository and people
> won't bother packaging crap (since crap is usually more difficult to
> package properly)
>  

Not necessarily.  I was thinking in the web servers in an old Debian.
There were six of them: -Apache of course.   -Boa because it was
faster than Apache -Another one whose main merit was to be zero conf
And three other ones I don't remember but who had no particular merit
(one of them being the obsolete NCSA server).  I don't doubt they have
more than six by now

When you put six programs for the same task you end noticing 1) that 
after a time some of them are no longer maintained: keeping them in 
the distro becomes increasingly difficult as the programs fall back
behind the libraries, compiler and kernel.  This also means nobody is
checking that it remains state of the art for security (eg the problem
of formatted strings).  But the people who are using them because "it
was in the distro" (ie it is partly your fault) won't be happy if you
remove them

2) That six programs doing the same thing means six times more resources
spent at packaging them and six times more security problems.

3) That some features lose most of their importance: zero conf when
Apache gets a simple configurator, speed when a 500$ machine has three
times more power than needed. 

4) That users get headaches while shifting through six web servers,
twenty window managers and thirty editors

-- 
Jean Francois Martinez <jfm512 at free.fr>