Core vs. Extras

[Jim Cornette]

Michael Schwendt wrote:
> On Tue, 5 Apr 2005 16:14:41 -0400, Gregory Maxwell wrote:
> 
> 
>>Here are some reasons that if I were a package, I might not want to be
>>in extras:
>>
>>1. Much smaller audience (lots of people do install everything in
>>core, but not so with extras today)
> 
> 
> Moot point, as laziness is the primary reason why Joe User chooses an
> everything-install in the fear that manual selection of packages would be
> to complicated or time consuming. 

With no group select feature and not having all potential packages 
available to select/deselect during the install, it is better for me to 
do an everything install. You should be able to select every package 
available during install and there should be a seperate group that 
relates to the labnguage packages.

After doing an everything install, I ran rpm -e to rmove all of the 
additional language packages that were installed using an everything 
install and the languages was the reason that I avoided doing an 
everything install in the past.

Now with so many packages not available and also so many seperated 
packages, especially the java packages, an everything install is more 
attractive than a server, workstation, desktop or custom install.

It is not lazyness as much as the installer being pretty darned scaled 
down regarding functionality in these later days.


Despite the availability of tools like
> Yum, it's still considered too inconvenient to add missing pieces after
> installation (and system-config-packages is a dead end with regard to
> adding software to an up-to-date FC). And do those people only install
> everything, or do they also use everything? Where is the benefit of users
> who install everything but use only a fraction of the packages? For most
> of the Extras users it makes no sense to install every package from
> Extras.


Yum for development usage is pretty much a tool that needs a lot of 
special steps to get it to be useful. I came up with a script tht I use 
after it fails to install programs because of it not doing its best, 
then feeding you a list of unresolved programs. I have not tried the yum 
shell feature yet, since I get that you cannot run commands like yum 
shell do-your-best in the shell and commands like list unresolved 
packages or similar useful features.

> 
> 
>>2. More difficult distribution model (if someone burns me the DVD ISO
>>redhat provides it has all of core, but none of extras)

Being that extras has so many worthy packages, it would be great if 
these packages could be available during install, as an additional 
CD/DVD or included on the Core DVD version


> 
> 
> Does the same "someone" also burn complete Fedora Core Updates onto a
> separate DVD?

Because of the possibility of needing to install a fresh system and then 
needing to downloading an enormous amount of additional rpms, I have 
saved the downloaded packages from such an instance for usage on future 
clean installed systems. Providing an ISO which included the updates 
might not be a bad venture.

Extras has a lot of programs that I use and trust to use. I don't see 
any deflection in quality, but more creative and fun to use programs 
than core.

  I'll stop here.

Jim

-- 
Q: What's the difference between Windows 95 and a highly destructive virus?
A: About 90 MB of hard disk space.