change isdn4k-utils to optional

[Ralf Corsepius]

On Wed, 2008-09-17 at 00:29 -0400, Dan Williams wrote:
> On Tue, 2008-09-16 at 23:39 +0200, Jos Vos wrote:
> > On Tue, Sep 16, 2008 at 11:22:37PM +0200, Benny Amorsen wrote:
> > 
> > > I am not surprised that you have analogue dialup customers. I am very
> > > surprised that ISDN dialup still exists. ISDN BRI must have been a
> > > massive success in Germany compared to pretty much anywhere else.
> > 
> > I'm surprised that people make so many assumptions about other countries.
> > And till I do not understand why it is so unbelievable that there are
> > still ISDN dialups.
> 
> I think it's mainly "OMG HTF can you use teh intarwebs @ 128kbps"?  56k
> dialup is just unbelievably horrible for anything other than POP email
> these days, and ISDN is not much faster...
Did you ever used ISDN?

There are various advantages of ISDN over analog. Even with DSL/VolIP,
some of them still are valid today.

>   These days with ADSL pushing
> 30,000ft (about 9km) at more than two or three times ISDN speeds,
> there's not much of a point in ISDN.

True, but /me thinks people from outside of Germany are not aware about
the role ISDN in Germany has. ISDN has been the "standard technology"
for phone communication in Germany over more than a decade.

It's just thanks to the fact that "German Federal Post" and their
successors (Telekom, T-com etc.), haven't managed to abandon analog
phone lines "on the last mile", that you still find analog phone lines
at all.

So, I'd recommend to turn the question into "Why doesn't everybody use
broadband in your country/neighborhood?" Your answers would be similar
to what I would have to reply above.

An alternative question would be: Is Fedora usable without broadband?
Then my answer would be: No, Fedora is unusable without broadband, all
packages dealing with dial-up on non-broadband can be made optional,
because they likely lack a user-base.

Ralf