Ther are a couple of different possiblities for where we pay... at the moment we save 4MB on the default install. This is not as trivial as people make out - my 6GB drive is generally full, and I actively look at anything over 1MB to see if I can get rid of it. Add to that the time to download (in Australia this is still surprisingly slow over phone lines, which is how I do it) and it is clear that it would be nice not to install this unnecessarily.
On the other hand there are lots of people running fink who are not really good at understanding how the system works, and who are benefitting most from the fact that fink decides where to put the things in their directories so thhey don't end up with their usual mess of a desktop containing multiple copies of the same software because they are unable to manage it "properly". For these people the fact that they install a apckage and then it doesn't run is a pain. I think the best solution is to have the dependency on x11-server as a possibility, and make that the default for packages currently dependent on x11. After that it would be helpful for the expert few if maintainers provided a cut-down version of their package that didn't require the server, allowing people to easily save the 4MB. In practice I think the people who don't need the server tend to be people who could happily remove it by hand, whereas the people who do need it are often (in my experience 7 of 9) people who have no idea what to do when they haven't got the server. Meking the system easy for beginners and sufficiently flexible to support the needs of experts is far better than having something that only works for experts. This is a rationale for packaging in the first place - the time it saves expert users is nothing compared to the productivity it provides for novices. just my 2 bits... chaals On Tue, 7 Jan 2003, Anthony DeRobertis wrote: >[ Please forgive me if the tone is a little harsh; I'm stuck in front of > a Windoze box for the moment... ] > >> Sure you can think of scenarios where someone might want the X >> libraries installed and not the X server, but these are largely >> artificial. > >Erm, what?! I have at least 20 servers, of varios OS's, which have the X11 >base clients and X11 shared libraries in stalled, but no X11 server. No X >fonts, font servers, etc. either. > >Why would I? I don't even have a monitor on some of them; many are at >various data centers; etc. ssh -X forwards X11 to my workstation. > >> As people have pointed out you are only saving 5-10% of >> the size of the distribution by separating out the server and there > >For those of us with 10GB HDs, XFree takes some very real disk space! And >don't say that's silly --- it's what my slightly over a year old iBook has. >I have many servers with far less. > > > > >------------------------------------------------------- >This SF.NET email is sponsored by: >SourceForge Enterprise Edition + IBM + LinuxWorld = Something 2 See! >http://www.vasoftware.com >_______________________________________________ >Fink-devel mailing list >[EMAIL PROTECTED] >https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/fink-devel > -- Charles McCathieNevile http://www.w3.org/People/Charles tel: +61 409 134 136 SWAD-E http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/Europe fax(france): +33 4 92 38 78 22 Post: 21 Mitchell street, FOOTSCRAY Vic 3011, Australia or W3C, 2004 Route des Lucioles, 06902 Sophia Antipolis Cedex, France ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.NET email is sponsored by: SourceForge Enterprise Edition + IBM + LinuxWorld = Something 2 See! http://www.vasoftware.com _______________________________________________ Fink-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/fink-devel
