Re: ["Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull@sk.tsukuba.ac.jp>] Re: apt-get
karlheg@bittersweet.inetarena.com (Karl M. Hegbloom) writes:
> ------- Start of forwarded message -------
> From: "Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull@sk.tsukuba.ac.jp>
[ snip ]
> Debian also used to be a lean distribution that installed a base
> system and only stuff over and above that the admin asked for plus
> dependencies. Now Debian is as bloated by default as any of the
> others,
>
While he is a bit exaggerating it stroke me as well, that a minimal
Debian installation (speaking about potato) has been increased to
become around some 80 MBs. In slink this used to be under 50 MB.
> with many bogus dependencies (depends that should be
> recommends, recommends that should be suggests---and doc packages
> should _never_ suggest the main package;
>
Yes, i found some of these as well. My favorite (not!) is the
qt-devel package which always tries to force me to install the various
MBs large qt-doc package as well. I once wrote a personal mail to the
current maintainer (a year ago or so) but ist was ignored/overseen
(suppoesedly without any bad intentions). Yes, i'll better send out
an official bug report instead. Probably serves far better as a
constant reminder ... ;-)
In any case *no* package should *force* installation of it's related
documentation if the admin has no use/interest/disk space for it. A
recommendation or suggestion should *never* be turned into a
dependency. In the case of qt i just wanted to compile stuff and i
definitely don't need the documentation for such a simple task.
> There was a brief power out last night; when I came in today, all of
> my workstations booted to fvwm2, when my preferred wm is windowmaker.
> Somewhere over the last few updates fvwm2 silently (IMO offering to
> change the configuration as the default option in the middle of
> upgrading 150 packages is "silent") substituted itself as the
> preferred wm.
>
I've been bitten by this as well.
> Obviously Debian philosophy has changed;
>
It probably hasn't but maybe some maintainers lost some of their
awareness of it...
Cheers, P. *8^)
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