Fedora 11 wireless-tools yum erase?

Dan Williams dcbw at redhat.com
Mon Jun 22 14:14:42 UTC 2009


On Sun, 2009-06-21 at 13:01 +0100, Frank Murphy wrote:
> On 21/06/09 12:57, Michal Schmidt wrote:
> >
> > Someone already requested this:
> > https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=480558
> 
> Good
> 
> >
> > Why does it bother you? The package is not that big.
> 
> It's not about size, it's about making sense.
> No wireless, therefore why wireless installed.

Same reason the kernel installs a lot of drivers.  If you, in the
future, plug something wireless in, it'll work.

It's also a question of maintainability.  Sure, we could split up tons
of packages and add code to all the tools to check runtime-availability
of every tool they might use.  But that's just insane, and increases the
maintenance burden tremendously.

So the tradeoff is between the packagers maintaining an ugly patch that
upstream probably won't care about, against making the 5% of people who
really want to remove wireless-tools happy.  Every change like this
increases the maintenance burden, and I'd argue that it's simply not
worth it.  There's also value to being able to just plug hardware in and
have it work without downloading additional software.

Dan





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