On 6/8/10 1:15 PM, Garrett D'Amore wrote:
d) every bit costs something. to compile, to link, to deliver. Just in
the listing of /usr/bin. Anything which serves no useful function
should IMO be removed. (Individually, these costs are minuscule, but
taken collectively over the entire life of a distribution, across
everyone who ever looks at them, has to compile, build or install them,
and across multiple such "trivially useless" projects, the costs can be
much larger.)
While I don't feel strongly about this particular case, I have to say I
don't really buy that argument in general. Many parts of Solaris may
have value to only a relatively small audience, but the positive value
to that audience is often much larger than the small gain to everyone
else from removing the feature.
I'm not convinced that we have an effective way to figure out which
features fall into this category, unless someone who cares about the
feature happens to be watching PSARC when the EOF fast-track goes by.
This is similar to the discussion about which packages to remove from
SFW; even if each individual package (or feature) is valuable only to a
small group, removing enough pieces makes it likely that everyone is
affected by at least one of the removals.
For the SFW packages, I like the suggestion that was made earlier about
reviewing the overall removal plan rather than discovering it through
individual fast-tracks. I don't know that it's possible to review a
similar plan for small feature removals like this case, but we should be
aware that the same limitations apply in our ability to judge the impact
of individual removals.
Scott
--
Scott Rotondo
Senior Principal Engineer, Solaris Core OS Engineering
President, Trusted Computing Group
Phone: +1 650 786 6309 (Internal x86309)
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