Summary of Dropped Packages

[David Woodhouse]

On Thu, 2005-02-24 at 14:59 -0500, Bill Nottingham wrote:
>
>It's not random; it's following fairly simple guidelines:
>
>- removal of duplicate functionality
>- removal of functionality that (arguably) doesn't fit the normal
>  Core usage cases
>- games

Non-random would have seen Postfix dropped too, under the same criteria.
Not that I'm suggesting that would be a good thing to do at this point
either; mind you. I don't use Postfix myself but it's in FC3 and people
are using it so we can't drop it.

It's not about favourite-MTA advocacy -- it wasn't me who added Exim to
Fedora (or RHEL) and I don't own the package there. Neither was it me
who first suggested making it the default IIRC, although I'm inclined to
agree. If it had never been added to Fedora, that would have been fine
by me -- but dropping packages which were in FC3 is broken, especially
as we _know_ we can make a far better job of trimming Core down to size
when Extras works nicely in FC5.

I'm not suggesting that we shouldn't _ever_ move Exim and Postfix to
Extras -- I'm suggesting that we shouldn't do it _now_ in such an
uncontrolled fashion; instead we should do it in FC5 when the upgrade
will be able to cope. 

The same goes for XFCE as far as I can tell -- we're cutting off a large
set of machines which will no longer be able to run Fedora graphically.

Avoiding bloat is a sane enough goal -- but the 4 CD target seems
somewhat over the top. Three reasons were given for it IIRC:

 - 25% increase in media costs for those making CDs.

In _media_ costs alone maybe. In fact you could phrase it differently --
you could call it a 100% increase in "5th CD media cost". Or you could
perhaps quote a percentage of the _total_ costs of such operators --
about 1% maybe? CDs are dirt cheap, and I suspect that the media cost
really isn't a large proportion of the total.

 - Mirror sites might drop Fedora if it grows

The only mirror admin who I've seen respond has basically said "bring it
on". Are there examples of those who've said otherwise? 300M on a mirror
site doesn't seem like much. This sounds dubious to me.

 - Users will drop Fedora if it grows

This one is the most spurious of all -- I suspect you'll see more users
dropping Fedora if we lose XFCE than you'd lose just because they have
to download an extra half-CD worth of packages for FC4.

We can fix this properly in FC5, and make Extras a first-class citizen;
Extras really isn't ready yet for us to be using it as an excuse or
mechanism for dumping packages from Core.

-- 
dwmw2