The Fedora Core Pruning project, Re: some minor Core pruning

[David Eisenstein]

Bill Nottingham wrote:
> David Eisenstein (deisenst at gtw.net) said: 
> 
>>Further -- I see much glibness about saying, "Throw this over to extras.
>>Throw that over to extras.  Extras can take care of it."  I understand
>>there appears to be some community-wide consensus that it is a "Good
>>Thing"®™ to reduce the size of Fedora Core.  (I am afraid I don't know
>>Mr. Extras - can he handle all these new packages?)
> 
> 
> Look over the list of packages provided. It's all packages with no
> dependencies, either runtime or buildtime. Most of said packages are
> libraries. I see no motiviation for Core to provide libraries that
> aren't actually *used*; there is really no way that that benefits
> users.
> 
> Bill

I apologize, Bill, and to all of you, for my rather harsh words.  The
glibness is mine, not yours.  Sorry.

Dumb question:  Where exactly do I find the list of packages provided?

One thing that does concern me some is:  What of people who, say, have been
using Fedora Core since the olden days, and who have custom or proprietary
applications on their computers that may require some of these older
deprecated libraries that upgrading to a newer Core will no longer provide?
 Even though *current* applications in Core (or Extras?) no longer use such
libraries, it can still affect these users who may wish to upgrade to newer
releases of Core.  For some, altering their sources to work with a newer
supported library may not be an option.

Please bear in mind that these thoughts come from a Legacy standpoint, as
Fedora Legacy has been my main contribution to the Fedora Project:  So
keeping older things running has been my focus so far, not running the
latest and greatest.  (What was that SELinux thing again?  ;-)  )

The plan then is to let Fedora Extras contributors take over these library
packages to continue maintaining them for new Core releases, right?  If no
one steps forward then to maintain these packages, do they then become
orphaned/unmaintained or even unavailable?

Thanks for your patience with me.

	Warm regards,

	David Eisenstein