Re: Why is Evolution and Epiphany now a part of gnome-core?
On Mon, 17 Jan 2011 12:26:17 -0500, Hal Vaughan wrote:
(I'm going to play here the role of the devil's advocate... oh, well)
> This is an example of why I've been moving away from FOSS. Someone
> makes a good point in a bug report and the
> programmer/developer/maintainer throws it back in his face, which allows
> the bug to be closed out quickly.
The more voices defending a point of view, the better for the maintainer/
developer "in power" to revisit his/her policy for the metapackages
involved. But I can only see "one" guy (the OP) in that bug report
complaining about the problem he has detected...
> I think it's a legitimate concern and just because one person pointed it
> out does not mean it only effects one person.
You also need to care about the DD outlook and his point of view,
explained there (copy/paste from message #31):
***
(...) in squeeze, the gnome-session package now
depends on the basic components that are actually needed for running a
GNOME session. Since this change was made, I hadn’t known what to do of
gnome-core, as it had became obsolete. The size issue of fitting GNOME
on the first CD gave an obvious answer to what this metapackage should
become.
So in short:
* gnome-core = GNOME installation designed to fit on one CD
* gnome-desktop-environment ≈ GNOME as defined by upstream
* gnome = full GNOME installation for the default installation
***
This approach can be further discussed, of course, and additional/
alternative solutions could have been presented in the bug report, but
again, there are no more complaints on developers' decission :-(
(note that everybody can reopen a bug)
> Yes, I care about it. I usually run Debian for headless systems that
> don't use X or a DE, but when I'm using a GUI on Debian, and need to use
> a Gnome program, there's much more sense to it requiring and installing
> the bare minimum of what it needs than installing a lot of bloat. Isn't
> the "Debian way" more about allowing customization and forcing as little
> as possible on the users or sys-admins?
I would like to stick up for Debian here.
Debian is a distribution that tends to split packages a lot (and I mean
*a lot*) which I really think _is a good practice_ because it gives both,
plain users (by means of metapackages) and admins (by cherry picking just
the needed packages) the full control on their systems.
And Debian's GNOME (precisely GNOME) has 3 different metapackages that
can be used to get this DE installed... three options!! that is
unthinkable in other distributions available out there which just provide
"one" DE metapackage and afterwards the user has to remove the components
he/she does not want at all.
With this writing I only wanted to note that sometimes we (users) are
requesting too much from developers/maintainers and while OTOH
complaining about a decission is the right path to go (at least IMO) we
should also show a bit more empathy and put ourselves in the place of the
person that is putting three different packaging flavors (three different
alternatives) for we (the users) to decide what to install.
I'm sure metapackages can be improved (of course!) and I would also like
to see the installer asking me what e-mail server I prefer instead
installing Exim by default but again, there is the "preseed" option and
there is the option of adding Postfix later, so that is fine with me.
I also like the fact that GNOME is the default DE in Debian but here we
also have the KDE team making a good job in delivering KDE users the
better experience with this DE.
In brief, I think Debian delivers a quasi perfect 50/50 ratio between
user's own preferences and easy customization.
Greetings,
--
Camaleón
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