Re: Trimming priority:standard
On Fri, 12 Sep 2014, Josh Triplett wrote:
> > * dc: a RPN calculator is pretty esoteric, bc is for "normal people".
>
> Just filed a bug for that one.
>
> I'd actually argue that both bc and dc should become "optional".
*no*!
bc is the standard Unix calculator, normally a dc frontend,
and used in *a lot* of scripts.
I’m ambiguous about GNU dc (since GNU bc does not use it,
and I’ve seen fewer – still not none – scripts using it),
but if there is no bc or ed on a system, it’s Windows or
something.
And yes, bc is also the primary interactive calculator,
for things beyond what $((…)) can do.
> > * telnet: dead for 19 years. Used only by those who misspell 'nc' and hope
> > for no 0xff bytes.
> Also, it's sad that "netcat-traditional" is priority important, rather
> than "netcat-openbsd", which has far more useful features (for instance,
Agreed that netcat-openbsd (*not* netcat-traditional!) should
supersede telnet (because of 0xFF, but also because nc is
line-buffered and telnet is unbuffered), but again, removing
telnet is against the expectations of most Unix users.
> > On the other hand, I'd nominate 'locales' for priority:important. Needed
> > for working UTF-8 support.
>
> Not needed; just set LANG=C.UTF-8, provided by libc-bin (Essential:
> yes). We should do that by default.
Agree. And if that should ever *not* be enough, “locales” also
isn’t and you need “locales-all” instead. (I’ve seen random PHP
webapplications break if locales-all was not installed, with
segfaults and all…)
> - at. Trivially installed by anyone actually using it, but we don't
> need one more daemon running on everyone's system just to watch for
> jobs via a service that almost nobody uses.
Eh sorry? at+cron are standard Unix.
> - bc, along with dc, as mentioned above.
Absolutely no.
> - host, a transitional package.
> https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=645437
Right, but bind9-host is really heavy…
> - bsd-mailx. Any package that uses this will depend on it. Very few
> people use this as a mail reader, and it's trivially installed for
> people who have scripts that invoke it (rather than the more common
> case of invoking sendmail). And this doesn't work at all without an
> installed or configured MTA, another good reason to give it the boot.
Agreed; prio:standard should probably not pull in this (and,
via it (and only it, IIRC), one of the MTAs, the discussion
of which to choose is political).
But then, an MTA configured to listen and deliver locally,
and send mails out, belongs to a standard system…
> - procmail. Anyone using this can trivially install it, but it's far
> from common, and it wouldn't be shocking for a system (particularly a
> system other than a mail server) to not have it preinstalled.
Agreed. procmail seems to be a GNU phenomenon anyway; I’ve
not seen it on a non-GNU OS, unless the admin or a user was
already a fan of it.
> - w3m. Very few people use text-based web browsers, and we should not
> have one in standard.
At least not w3m but lynx, which is the standard text browser;
w3m is also really… weird to use.
> - make-guile. More of a question than a recommendation for a change,
> but why is this standard and make optional, rather than the other way
> around?
oO this is new…
> - mlocate. We don't need a "locate" in standard; anyone who actually
> uses locate (and wants the very significant overhead of running a
> locate daemon) can easily install this.
Disagree, locate should be there.
> - nfs-common and rpc-bind. Anyone using NFS can install these, but NFS
> is not anywhere close to common enough to appear in priority standard.
ACK.
bye,
//mirabilos
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