Re: bloatware

On Sun, Mar 30, 2003 at 10:45:39AM +0400, Vadim Plessky wrote:
>On Sunday 30 March 2003 04:09, Havoc Pennington wrote:
>|  On Sat, Mar 29, 2003 at 11:49:13PM +0300, Vadim Plessky wrote:
>|  > Ok, what about 60MB of "font sources" (PCF, BDF fonts) in XFree86 CVS
>|  > and resulting 20MB of "installable fonts" in RPMs?
>|  > Isn't it bloatware?
>|
>|  If you don't want to use those fonts, just delete them. This is not
>|  that hard. ;-)
>
>That's not so easy.
>Many apps use 'fixed' font name as default fontback.

That's trivial for you to fix.

>Those apps (incl. Window Managers) would just crash if that font is missing.
>
>Besides, deleting 60Mb of fonts from sources would reduce size of all Linux 
>distributions - RedHat, Mandrake, SuSE, etc.
>I am speaing about both RPMs and SRPMs combined.

You don't want them => nobody can have them?  That's the problem
with those of you that want to strip things down.  You want it
stripped down to your particular requirements, and screw everyone
else.  XFree86 has a wide target audience, certainly much wider
than the vocal minority present here.  Lots of stuff is *optional*,
so if you don't want it, don't build it.  If you find things that
aren't optional that you think should be, submit a patch that fixes
it.  Whinging about it will make exactly zero difference.  The
fonts have been optional for years.  Not only that, there's a
reasonable amount of control over what subset of the fonts actually
gets installed.

If the distros want that space saving, there's nothing stopping
them from deleting them from their version.  The XFree86 release
tarballs have stuff like the fonts and spec docs broken out already,
so you don't even need to download them if you don't want it.

It seems to me that you're looking for something to complain about.
You're welcome to off course, but it might be more productive to
put your efforts into the real problems.

David
-- 
David Dawes
Founder/committer/developer                     The XFree86 Project
www.XFree86.org/~dawes