On Fri, Dec 31, 1999 at 11:18:14AM +0100, Filip Van Raemdonck wrote:
> Anthony Towns wrote:
> > On Fri, Dec 31, 1999 at 12:03:02AM -0800, Robert Woodcock wrote:
> > > Hello, I think TeX and Emacs should no longer be standard.
> > Emacs is a pretty important part of the GNU system (as far as the FSF
> > goes), and TeX is a fairly useful thing to have around too. People who
> > don't want it are, of course, free to not have them.
> Important, but certainly not standard.
Note that `important' is a higher priority than `standard'. There aren't
any shades at all for `optional'.
> If I were to known 20 people who
> use and *know* Linux or some BSD flavour, only 3 out of them would
> install Emacs and TeX (unless perhaps the others would need TeX to be
> used eg. by some print-filter).
Really? Most of the Linux users I know use Emacs quite a bit, and many
use TeX too for reports and theses and such.
Gosh. Experiences varying? Who'd've thunk it?
> I don't recall the exact numbers, but what's shown here are the
> important figures and they are certainly correct. Seen the fact that I
> have systems on 486 which use only 70 MB of hdspace and are pretty
> functional, I wouldn't call whatever packages which would make the used
> space grow with over 25% standard.
Why not? Standard is just a starting point, it's not the be-all and
end-all. You start with the set of packages in standard, work out what
you want to do, get rid of some, add others.
> > Personally, I'd be inclined to upgrade X11 to Standard. What's changed
> > since it was put in policy originally? Computers have become a lot faster
> > and larger, and a lot more GNU/Linux users expect to have a GUI available.
> Wrong. Windows users will expect to have a gui available. I spent about
> 95 % of my time in the VC. And of those same 20 people, at least 15 will
> also do so.
ie, three-quarters of experienced Linux users don't use netscape,
don't preview their documents before printing them, don't use xfig,
don't play quake... This, also, isn't even remotely like my experience.
According to the popularity-contest, 540/753 (or about 14 of 20 people)
have xserver-common (and presumably an xserver) installed, eg.
Cheers,
aj
--
Anthony Towns <aj@humbug.org.au> <http://azure.humbug.org.au/~aj/>
I don't speak for anyone save myself. GPG encrypted mail preferred.
``The thing is: trying to be too generic is EVIL. It's stupid, it
results in slower code, and it results in more bugs.''
-- Linus Torvalds
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