FC4 slimfast slimfest

[Phil Muldoon]

On Mon, 2005-02-21 at 20:11 -0600, Chris Adams wrote:
> Once upon a time, Alexandre Oliva <aoliva at redhat.com> said:
> > Think of it this way: would you push OOo to extras?  Why not?  If so,
> > why insist on pushing other very, perhaps even more useful pieces of
> > software there, before they have be regarded as actually part of the
> > distro, not as second-class citizens?
> 
> How many Fedora users will use OOo vs. how many will use Java
> development tools?  The main use most users have for Java is applets,
> and Fedora doesn't have anything for applets yet (you still have to use
> Sun's JRE which can't be included in Fedora).

I must respectfully disagree.  You can reduce any package set to a
negligible corner case usage, but often I think the reality is
different. We need Java in some form to run Eclipse, which is an (open
source) IDE. Until now there has been no viable open source Java stack
available to support Eclipse (it requires a very decent implementation).
Now there is. The way that Eclipse is written is just one example of
Java applications that aren't the infamous applet example. 

Regardless of whether you like Java, or Eclipse, there is a lot of open
source work going on with both. The Eclipse community is huge and
thriving community (eclipse.org), that has coverage for many, many
languages and environments (including C/C++/Python/Perl et al). Several
other distributions (like Debian, Gentoo etc) already have it integrated
into their systems.

> I think you are overestimating the importance of Java to the average
> user.

Which raises an interesting point. We are on tricky ground when we try
to define the  median user of Fedora. More developers than user level
consumers? More academic than commercial? Who knows. We could have a
community just thirsting for Java ;)

Regards

Phil