Hi Jim, good to think about the package list :-)
If you ask me, the distro has grown large because a SMALL number of packages are rather LARGE. Even then, when you do not install all sources, it uses a lot less space: It would be fine to keep the sources zipped until one wants to work on a specific package. > 1. Move bz2, gzip, and tar to the "Unix" group Nice idea to collect Unix like tools in a group, yes. > 3. Remove ... 7zdec, arj, cabext, lpq1, lzip, lzma, lzop, zoo I guess it would be okay to have those somehow separate, although I wonder how large they are anyway. People might enjoy ARJ and CAB support out of the box. > *Boot Tools* > *I don't have any strong feelings here. What are your thoughts? I expect them to be small and would keep them. > *Development* > Can we pare down the list a bit? I guess the complete DJGPP ecosystem could be moved to a separate group, it can get really big. > 1. Move perl to the "Unix" group That would confuse me. Perl is multi-platform and it clearly is a programming language. > 2. Keep BWBasic, the DJGPP packages, FASM, the FBC packages > (FreeBASIC Compiler) fpc (FreePascal compiler), the GCC-IA16 > packages, JWASM, NASM, OW (OpenWatcom C Compiler), and UPX I would move UPX to archivers, although it is not multi-file. People will have to be aware that FBC, FPC, OW, DJGPP are big. > 3. Remove bcc (Bruce's C Compiler), euphoria, insight, lua, regina, runtime I would move RUNTIME to some generic tool category. I believe Regina REXX was not very small, while some others are small? > *Editors* > Not sure about these. I know there are a few here I'd like to keep: > Blocek, Elvis, FED, Freemacs, MSEDIT, pico, Vim I would add SETEDIT because it can edit large files, maybe TDE? > *Emulators* > I don't think that these are useful to include... Most of them will need rather specific files to use, yes. > These all fall in the general category of "games," anyway. They should be kept separate if you ask me, but I agree to not have them in the ISO. Rather offer them online. > *Games* > I generally feel that we can add and remove games in the FreeDOS > distribution on a whim. If a game is interesting and open source Having a few dozen small games can certainly be fun, but I guess BOOM (Doom) or KRAPTOR might be quite large? Would be great to have a game screenshot gallery online :-) Frotz should probably be moved to emulators. > *Graphical Desktop* > We added GUIs a long time ago... Of course most GUI do not have lots of apps, so it might be good to treat them similar to emulators by offering them separately, outside the ISO. How about the set of productivity apps ported by Georg Potthast? I agree that OpenGEM is a good choice as general GUI. > *Networking* > I don't run FreeDOS with a network... While packages are slowly getting outdated, they can be fun to use at times. Does VNC viewer still work? Links, Lynx, Dillo and Arachne are the four larger, more powerful browsers in this category. It would be good to hear how people like their size power balance? > *Sound* > I know OpenCP and MPlayer both work fine, because I demo'd them > in a YouTube video. I don't have any opinions otherwise. The others are: BladeEnc (MP3), AdPlay (OPL), cdp (CDDA), DOSMid (MIDI) and LAME (MP3). I think they are all useful OPL FM song files are probably rare, but the player small. > *Unix* > The wiki page lists a few packages to remove based on > duplicates or license concerns. Which ones would you remove? > 1. Move bz2, gzip, and tar from "Archivers" to "Unix" One could argue either way about those three. > 2. Move perl from "Devel" to "Unix" As said, Perl should count as programming language, not Unix. > *Utilities* > We have a mix of things in this package group... > 2. Remove b64, blwcbc, bmp2png, bsum, daa2iso, edict, fdshell, It is good to have Base64 support and PNG support. Blowfish, BSD sum and DAA/GBI are indeed exotic. FDSHELL and EDICT (disk imaging) sound useful. > finddisk, flashrom, gifsicle, hip, hiram, pgme, > pngcrush, sqlite, terminal, topspin, wptail, zdir,> zerofill Of course I suggest to keep FINDDISK and TERMINAL :-) FLASHROM sounds useful, depending on how many mainboard chipsets it is able to BIOS update? HIP and GIFsicle sound a bit exotic. I do not see PGME on the list, so no opinion about that. How does HIRAM compare to UMBPCI? PNGCRUSH is a bit exotic, as is SQLITE. If anything, the latter could be kept as a programming language? TOPSPIN, WHIPTAIL and similar might be too special. I have no opinion about ZDIR. ZEROFILL can be really useful before diskimage creation. > *We have both doslfn and lfndos, but do we need both? > Is one better (more complete) than the other? Probably yes, but I do not remember. I agree that all utilities by Jack are useful :-) > I skipped some packages in that list. I don't have a > good opinion on those. What do you think? If you could make a list of those? Regards, Eric _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
