Re: more and base

[Charles Wilson <cwilson at ece dot gatech dot edu>]

Joshua Daniel Franklin wrote:

> My personal opinion is that one of the developers (like Rob or Chris) should
> just fix the categories for various packages like 'more' or 'which' that are 
> currently in Base. Please do so for 'more' or let me know what to do.
> 
> With 'more' I wanted it to be in the *default* install but not in *base*. 
> (how??) 


We haven't yet decided; the exact mechanism is still being discussed. 
It may be something like

1) metapackages: empty packages that merely require 27 others === the 
'standard' install package, then the 'development' install package, etc
   --> single 'point of control'.  To add a new package to the 
'development' metapackage, you merely update its requirements: line. 
Thus, 'development' = the set of packages and their dependencies as 
listed in the development/setup.hint file.

2) clickable categories: alongside the current "Base" "Shells" "Utils" 
categories, there would also be 'Development' 'Standard' 'Server' 
packages, containing the indicated packages.  You want a development 
installation?  Click on the 'Development' category and (setup will) 
install everything therein.
   --> multiple points of control.  To add a new pacakge to the 
'development' category, you must add 'development' to the categories: 
line of the new package.  Thus, 'development' = union of all setup.hints 
that include "development" in their category membership list.

3) Something entirely different.  Your ideas here.


>> >> More is what? 3k? I'd love to have had it in the base install  when
>>
>                     ^^^
>                     23k, uncompressed. Plus another ~10k of docs.
> 
> 
>>Now, a Base-only cygwin installation may be *useless* in the sense that
>>"sure, cygwin works -- but I can't do anything useful with it except mv
>>files around, unless X Y and Z packages, which are not in Base, are
>>installed."  But useless is not the same as non-functional.
>>
> 
> Actually, I don't know if even fileutils should be 'base'. Does something
> depend on
> 'ls', 'mv', etc? (/etc/profile depends on 'id' in shellutils I think.)


As I said, it is possible that Base currently contains stuff that 
shouldn't be there, according to my definition above.  But that's a 
discussion for another thread.

>  And, if 
> the big-ksh-thing becomes a package, it would be theoretically possible that 
> someone just wants their AT&T tools and not GNU.


It doesn't look like the big-ksh-thing is going to happen, so no worries 
there -- also no 'goodies'.  But Karsten will be submitting ksh itself, 
so that's good.

However, I do understand cgf's concern: check the list for the 'how come 
mv doesn't work?' and 'chmod is broken' "questions".  Now imagine that 
for each one of those (repetitive, I'm too lazy to read the FAQ) 
questions, we as mailing list answer-providers now have to walk each 
petitioner thru yet another system-configuration analysis step:
   1) Are you running the ksh tools or the GNU tools?
   2) Huh?
   3) Okay, see, ksh provides many replacement versions...behave 
somewhat differently...yadda yadda...

Repeat the above exchange 87,324 times for different but similar 
questions...

--Chuck