Re: Trimming priority:standard
Vincent Danjean wrote:
> On 12/09/2014 18:41, Josh Triplett wrote:
> > ...I think this makes more sense: *neither* version of Make should have
> > priority standard. Bug filed.
>
> [And lots of other utility also requested to be removed from Standard
> priority..]
>
> When I see that 'make' and other well-known programs should not be
> installed on a system where we want "standard" Unix utilities to be
> there, I ask myself what "standard" Unix utilities are.
> I know that it can be easily installed with apt-get. But I appreciate
> to have a bunch of classic utilities to be installed when I ask for
> the "standard utilities" to be installed. Some tweak to the list
> can/should be done. But do not restrict the list to the essential ones
> (or provide a new task for standard-but-non-essential ones)
I'm not arguing that "standard" should have nothing in it; it should
have things that the vast majority of users will 1) expect to find
present without having to install them and 2) actually use or care
about. So, for instance, iputils-ping is priority important, because
it'd be shocking to not have "ping". man-db is priority important and
info is priority standard, because documentation is useful to have by
default, especially since you might need it while figuring out why you
can't install packages or connect to the network.
On the other hand, while "make" is widely used to build packages, and
occasionally for other purposes, it hardly seems like the kind of
utility you'd expect to find on a system without explicitly installing
it. Particularly since we *don't* provide compilers as part of
standard (nor should we).
> Some reflexions:
> I agree with you on "at" (and any other proposal to decrease the number
> of daemons) and "dc". But I see lots of people around me using "bc" for
> very small calculus.
Sure, but how many people expect it to exist without installing it? And
on top of that, how many people will end up using bc rather than (for
instance) gnome-calculator? And among engineers, personally I see far
more people firing up their programming language REPL of choice to do
math in a more familiar environment.
> I also think that having the "mailx" program
> installed is a good thing, not for regular use but for occasional use
> when going on a unix system where we do not know what is installed
> exactly (in this case, I try in order mutt, mailx, less, more, cat)
The problem with mailx isn't with the package itself, but that it
depends on a functioning MTA, which I'd like to get removed from
standard as a daemon that very few users will actually use or care
about.
- Josh Triplett
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