Re: Bug#64460: whois package shouldn't be Priority: important, rather optional
On 21-May-00, 15:02 (CDT), Josip Rodin <joy@cibalia.gkvk.hr> wrote:
> I believe you do, but a large majority of people never even heard of whois,
> and will never need it. Besides, most people expect to find X on every unix
> system, yet most of X in Debian is optional. OTOH argument to keep whois
> with the default Debian system (i.e. with a priority higher than optional)
> is its very small size.
The large majority of people have never heard of sed, either, but it
is none-the-less standard. FWIW, I don't expect to find X on every
Unix system, in fact I would be surprised to find it a lot of systems
(servers, firewalls, etc.)
The trouble is that we have conflated "standard" to "installed by
default". Installing X by default is obviously wrong, mostly because of
the size. Installing whois by default doesn't seem like a big deal, and
it *is* used a lot by sysadmins (or at least the ones who have to track
DNS problems/configurations).
If I'm on a Unix-like system, and "whois" returns "command not found",
then I say "what the fsck?".
> Let's CC: this to debian-devel, maybe someone else (smarter than me :) has
> an opinion on this.
Well, it's an opinion. Don't know about the rest :-).
Steve
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