build-essential

[Matt Zimmerman]

On Sat, Sep 04, 2004 at 12:53:37PM +1000, Jeff Waugh wrote:

> We don't put music tagging software in the desktop, claim that 'many'
> users will use it, and those who don't use it, won't notice it. We draw a
> line.  The same goes with build-essential. It is not true that 'many'
> users in our intended audience will use a compiler. We can claim it, but
> it's not true.
>
> So, the first part of my argument against it is that it's inappropriate
> for the DesktopSeed to begin with. Our intention with the DesktopSeed is
> to hit a sweet spot of commonality among our users, along with minimal
> install and on-CD size. build-essential just doesn't stack up - it's
> important for you and me, but not for the vast majority of our intended
> audience.

Neither of us has any facts for a comparison on an absolute scale, but I'll
wager than more of our users will use gcc than fully half of the packages in
Base+Desktop.  We ship a lot of command-line, development, and power-user
tools already (and for good reason!), while we leave out the single most
popular development tool in the open source world.

> Secondly, what we put on the Desktop CD - and more importantly, what we
> install by default - is a commitment. It's very hard to take something out
> once you've put it in. Suppose we include a whole raft of drivers and apps
> on the Ubuntu 5.4 CD, and realise that we have too much for the disk. What
> do we do? First against the wall is the ShipSeed, but what happens after
> that? Someone comes up with the bright idea that our desktop users don't
> care about compilers, so build-essential is removed. What happens when you
> do a CD-only upgrade?

It is positively laughable how much more supportable and mature gcc is than
any of the applications in the GNOME menu on our desktop.  It is more
suitable for such a commitment than most of what we currently ship.

As for the CD, we're already including the whole 4 megabytes of remaining
build-essential on our CD.  Software gets bigger, and eventually we won't be
able to fit any more software on the CD, even if we never change the package
list (which would be ludicrous).

-- 
 - mdz