"hard core" linux

[Paul A Houle]

Russell Coker wrote:

>Due to dependencies I don't think it will be possible to spin a distribution 
>without any of the programs which MAY have MP3 support.  You can't produce a 
>distribution with MP3 support and call it Fedora for legal reasons.
>
>  
>
    I don't see why I can't pull out any packages I want,  so long as I 
pull out all the dependencies -- this might involve yanking a lot of 
desktop stuff,  but so what.

    The only trouble I see is that some people might do a "yum install" 
of media-player dependent things which would then install the official 
media players,  which may conflict with locally installed media players.

>Probably the best thing to do for someone who wants MP3 support would be to 
>create a derivative distribution "based on Fedora Core" that has the MP3 
>support compiled in.
>  
>
    I don't have a lot of trouble installing the native mplayer rpm's 
and putting other stuff I want in /usr/local.  For instance,  rpm 
--erase xmms and install xmms from source.  The trouble I run into is 
that there are other things that depend on xmms (that I don't really 
use) and if I rpm --erase --nodeps xmms,  I end up having problems when 
I do yum updates later.

    If I could do a clean install that didn't include anything that 
references media players,  I can do what I want in the media player 
space,  use yum to maintain software that came with the OS,  and nobody 
gets hurt.

    A media player-free distribution would also be a good base for 
someone who wants to make an alternative distribution which has 
different media players,  since dependencies would be cleared.