Removing unwanted xorg-x11-drv packages

[Mike A. Harris]

Steve Grubb wrote:
> On Tuesday 05 September 2006 09:02, Pasha R wrote:
>> I don't think it is a good idea, distribution-wise. If you ever upgade
>> your graphic card, you will get a non-working system.
> 
> Then I wonder what the point was to splitting them up? I was one who thought 
> this would be a great time to jettison all the old video card drivers. Like 
> when would you ever install a Tseng video card? Or S3? And if you did, won't 
> the Vesa drivers work well enough until you install a more optimized driver?

The point of splitting them up, was to allow individual drivers to
be updated alone, to make maintenance of the driver packages simpler.
It was also to minimize the disk space usage on FTP servers and
mirror sites and network bandwidth usage consumed on those sites,
and on RHN et al. when a single driver needs to be updated.

To be very clear, never at any point in the decision to have individual
driver rpms, was it to allow people to uninstall drivers they didn't
want or need (or didn't think they wanted or needed), nor was it to
reduce or enable the user to reduce the amount of disk space used
by an OS installation.

The total disk space used by all X drivers combined is extremely
small, both in terms of megabytes, and in terms of dollars of disk
space.  Small enough on the scale of care, to be totally
negligible.





-- 
Mike A. Harris * Open Source Advocate * http://mharris.ca

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