Re: Excessive package interdependency

[David T Hollis <dhollis davehollis com>]

On Thu, 2003-12-18 at 03:32, Alexander Larsson wrote:

> 
> The nautilus package dependencies was very deliberately added in order
> to get "full" feature support when someone upgrades. This was done when
> these packages was added to the distro, and without the dependency the
> new features would not be installed on an upgrade. We considered it more
> important that the majority of the Gnome desktop users didn't get half a
> desktop than that someone had to install a couple of megs of possibly
> unnecessary dependencies.
> 
> As long as there is no other way to handle this in the installer I stand
> by my decision.
> 
> =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
>  Alexander Larsson                                            Red Hat, Inc 
I think the important thing to note here is that RedHat/Fedora (IMHO)
have always been aimed as a full-featured desktop/server installation. 
If the user really wanted a slim setup (an 8mb install for an FTP server
or something), they really should look elsewhere.  In a large number of
environments, losing a few megs of disk space to some packages that
won't be used really isn't critical.  It may be an inconvenience to
some, but certainly not for the majority so I think it's a sound policy.