FC4 for servers

[Ian Pilcher]

Michal Jaegermann wrote:
> 
> The other issue is a dependency creep.  Over time everything
> tend to depend on everything and you drop in into your set
> something seemingly innocuous and boom - you are installing
> half of KDE and artsd daemon even if you do not really have
> a sound card in that box (that is a description of a general
> trend so do not take program names too literally). IIRC Rodolfo
> bumped into that a number of times.  This is not something you
> can solve "outside" if dependencies are not guarded carefuly in
> the first place.
> 

This is an inevitable consequence of the UNIX tradition of compile-time,
rather than runtime, configuration.  Until that changes, it will be
basically impossible to create binary packages that are both functional
enough for a general purpose/desktop distribution and minimal enough for
a "stripped down" server.

Gentoo represents one approach to this issue; the only other one I can
think of would be to created a large number of duplicate packages --
foo-desktop and foo-server, bar-desktop and bar-server, etc.

-- 
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Ian Pilcher                                        i.pilcher at comcast.net
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