I think it would be nice if the Core could be slimmed down to 2 cds opposed to 3, just for convenience sake. It seems the main discussion here has been about the Core size and whether or not anti-virus should be included in the Core. I think that it would be nice to have the "core" of the Core composed of the necessities required for the average user on the first 2 cds, and on a 3 or 4 you could call that the "Core Extras Disk". This disk would contain other handy utilities and packages that aren't essential, but that would be nice such as anti-virus. I think what sv has been trying to say is that this distro is not just a server os, its going to be used on laptops, workstations, etc...and that AV isn't necessarily a core component of an operating system. In reality, most os' don't ship with any AV, thats the reason the AV companies make their money.
It would be very easy for Fedora Core to turn into a huge bloated distribution, not that would be that bad...it would just be a pain maintaining it and downloading everything needed to get up and running, and would come with much more than someone needs. The user doesn't need more options than they know what to do with. They need a functioning distro that contains what they need and not a ton of extra things that they will likely use. So in the big picture I think that a cd filled with extra components would be the best option for everyone.
On Mon, 2004-01-05 at 20:50, Casey Price wrote:
In reality, most os' don't ship with any AV, thats the reason the AV companies make their money.
Arguably, its because OS vendors don't want to be in the AV business. Designing intelligent virus detection routines is a non-trivial task that never really ends. An AV suite is only as good as the viruses it detects, and keeping virus definition files current is vital. These reasons are why the major players in the AV space have almost exactly remained the same for the last 10 years (maybe longer?).
I think counting installation CDs is pointless. Media is cheap, disk is cheap, bandwidth is cheap, and they're only getting cheaper. We shouldn't use that as an excuse to bloat the distribution, but its not the right approach to come at it.
I think the Core should be a framework, containing the basic tools and technologies to cover the majority of general purpose uses. I think the Core is more than Base (bash, kernel, glibc, etc), but not much more than is needed for the user to use yum or up2date to customize it to their liking. Users want package availability with the click of a mouse, which is why Debian and Gentoo are so popular. We can spend the next 12 years trying to get consensus about where to draw the line, but I would rather just draw it and get down to building packages to populate Fedora Extras, so that someone can type "up2date clamav" and pull it out of a repository immediately after install.
Today its AV, tomorrow it will be foo, the day after that bar... lets just take what we've got, intelligently trim it down, and call it Core. Everything else is Extras.
~spot --- Tom "spot" Callaway <tcallawa(a)redhat*com> LCA, RHCE Red Hat Sales Engineer || Aurora SPARC Linux Project Leader
"The author's mathematical treatment of the conception of purpose is novel and highly ingenious, but heretical and, so far as the present social order is concerned, dangerous and potentially subversive. Not to be published." -- Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World"
On Mon, 2004-01-05 at 21:56, Tom 'spot' Callaway wrote:
I think the Core should be a framework, containing the basic tools and technologies to cover the majority of general purpose uses. I think the Core is more than Base (bash, kernel, glibc, etc), but not much more than is needed for the user to use yum or up2date to customize it to their liking. Users want package availability with the click of a mouse,
While I agree that "click of a mouse" access is great, I also think that CDs fill an important role. Third parties are likely to sell CD's if you want to buy. You can carry them over to friends' houses. Have them when you've taken your laptop on the road. Have them when you move into a new house without DSL. Distributers are likely to BitTorrent them as opposed to individual packages.
If the core OS is slimmed down, I'd like to see add-on isos drawn from Extras released near the same time as Core. Maybe they could be organized along the lines of "Server Software", "Desktop Enhancements", "Toys", etc. As long as dependencies could be worked out, they could even be yum repositories on a disk.
On Mon, 5 Jan 2004, Tom 'spot' Callaway wrote:
Today its AV, tomorrow it will be foo, the day after that bar... lets just take what we've got, intelligently trim it down, and call it Core. Everything else is Extras.
SHREK: Example? Okay, um, distros like onions.
DONKEY: They stink?
SHREK: Yes. No!
DONKEY: They make you cry?
SHREK: No!
DONKEY: You leave them out in the sun, they get all brown, start sprouting' little white hairs.
SHREK: No! Layers! Onions have layers! Distros have layers! Onions have layers. You get it? They both have layers. [Sighs]
:-)
-- Paul Heinlein heinlein@madboa.com
On Mon, 2004-01-05 at 19:56, Tom 'spot' Callaway wrote:
On Mon, 2004-01-05 at 20:50, Casey Price wrote:
In reality, most os' don't ship with any AV, thats the reason the AV companies make their money.
Arguably, its because OS vendors don't want to be in the AV business.
Politically it all depends on how badly the next power outage in the US is related to a worm/virus attack. There is a reason that Microsoft bought RAV lately and is working on integrating it into Windows 2005 or something... the lawyers smell blood in the water.