On Sep 19, 2006, at 6:12 AM, Stephen R Marenka wrote:
I think we do need to have a discussion about ports that don't build thefull archive, but otherwise can make a stable release and get security support. Certainly m68k and likely arm users won't be running all the latest bloatware and thus don't need to be building it (how long wouldit take to load openoffice under kde on my m68k mac or even the fastestataris?). But drawing that line can be tricky because of dependencies.I don't think anyone who really cares about the issue has come up with agood way to frame the discussion or draw those lines yet.
I'd be interested in participating in this discussion. I think an awful lot of it also applies to s390. In that case, often the horsepower *is* at least theoretically available, but you don't *want* your Linux guest under VM (one of dozens) using much CPU, you don't *have* any actual graphics hardware available, and almost no one is using the box to do anything desktop-like at all (the major exception being applications that presume you're installing them from an X display).
Assuming that the dependency issue could be solved pretty cleanly, yeah, Debian on s/390 could get by with many, many packages removed, with little to no inconvenience to its actual users. In a lot of ways the niches for small Linux/390 virtual machines are very much like the niches for the NSLU2 (an arm-based device) and I think the two worlds could learn a lot from each other, and collectively have a lot to teach the world-of-people-using-big-spiffy-graphical-machines- like-ix86-or-ppc.
Adam