Why isn't emacs installed by default

[Patrice Dumas]

On Mon, Jun 04, 2007 at 02:05:03PM +0200, Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
> 
> Le Lun 4 juin 2007 13:39, Patrice Dumas a écrit :
> 
> > Are you sure? Which desktops are these? It's obvious that those
> > desktops
> > and the corresponding users are not the primary target of fedora, but
> > there is currently a rather diverse offer of desktop in fedora since
> > there, is at least:
> > mwm fvwm icewm fluxbox WindowMaker twm
> > and certainly others.
> 
> And how many of those are activelly developped ? How many will stay in

At least fvwm icewm fluxbox. twm and mwm seems to be almost dead, I
don't know at all about WindowMaker. And fvwm icewm fluxbox are
following, at least partially the freedesktop norms.

> Fedora once their packagers are asked to actually maintain the
> infrastructure they need?

That's a good question, but I hope that it won't need that much work,
since those environments are (in general) lightweight and simple.

> You have a vicious circle feature lag -> less users -> less
> developpers -> static maintenance -> orphan once something requires
> code adjustment and there's no one to provide it anymore (xorg is
> seriously thinking of dumping TWM now for example)

It is not clear to me that there are less users for simple desktops.
There are much less in term of percentage, sure, but in absolute number
it is far from clear. Moreover other distros are more light desktop
friendly (this corresponding sometime to different userbases) so
upstream may still be more actively supported there.

In any case, I think that the lagging features are not that dramatic and
my personal opinion is that things have improved dramatically with
regard with the situation that prevailed before Extras existed. Now we
have much more dockapps, much more window managers, and things like
pyxdg or perl-File-MimeInfo, or like conky. Even though there were no
users before Extras existed, there were potential users that hadn't a
way to show their interest in for those environment, now things are much 
better. So in fedora we have clearly seen the opposite direction.
TWM is a bad example since there are many substitutes that are still
maintained, like fvwm or fluxbox.

Still I agree that the userbases are reduced, those environments
have to follow where the innovations are (in kde and gnome in general),
but as I said otherwise, their simplicity leads to less development
needed in general.

--
Pat