On Fri, 28 Jan 2005, Chris Adams wrote:
Once upon a time, Rahul Sundaram rahulsundaram@yahoo.co.in said:
I do. Fedora core should only include one default program for each kind of task overall. there might be a few exceptions like including say nano as well as vim but having 5 different browsers and calling in fedora "core" doesnt make any sense at all
The #1 objective of Fedora Core is "Create a complete general-purpose operating system with capabilities equivalent to competing operating systems". There is _nothing_ in the objectives about providing a minimal OS that pushes all the optional packages to Fedora Extras.
It seems that a lot is being read into the word "Core" in the distribution that is not meant (at least according to the Fedora website).
It also seems that some people want to push every package they don't personally use 20 times a day to Extras, despite the fact that many others use those packages and that there are not always good alternatives in the distribution.
To me the core of the argument of moving things to Extras is all about responsibility and flexibility to allow outsiders to fix things. Everything inside Core is Red Hat's responsibility and moving things to Extras eases much of the overhead Red Hat has in maintaining Core.
The more resources that can help out, leaves Red Hat with extra resources they can spend on something else. Which accelerates Fedora and RHEL and helps out Linux in general. You can see it as a cost-cutting operation.
BTW I'm sure everything being removed from Core will exist in Extras when FC4 hits the mirrors, there's no need in predicting it will not.
-- dag wieers, dag@wieers.com, http://dag.wieers.com/ -- [all I want is a warm bed and a kind word and unlimited power]