Policy on X requirements.
Dan Merillat writes:
>
> Lately more and more text packages are adding X extensions.
>
> Quite often these are useless or even counter-intuitive (taking
> mouse control focus in vim inside of an Xterm, for instance)
>
> Since for most of these packages the X support is a hack or kludge,
> it really should be kept seperate. vim is fully useful without
> being compiled with X support. a seperate package (vim-x) containing
> simply the vim binary would suffice for X support.
You should read debian-policy. The current policy is to keep _archive_
bloat down by making these packages depend on the (relatively small) xlib6g.
> Other packages I've noticed that suffer from GUI bloat:
>
> mtools. Quick, who can tell me why mtools needs xlib6 installed?
> who can tell me why this functionality is needed in a command-line
> program (with NO graphical output whatsoever)? And why it can't
> be in a seperate package?
This has been hashed out many, many times on debian-devel. Check the archives.
--
Colin Walters <levanti@verbum.org>
http://web.verbum.org/levanti
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