On 12 March 09, Richard Creighton wrote: <snip>
And I have been told today that a Bugzilla I reported will not be solved because they consider my machine (P-IV, circa 2001) too old. So, Linux no longer supports old hardware :-(
Carlos, I think you actually make my point.....SuSE is worth saving, it used to work, it is becoming bloated, it is largely becoming bloated because of poor programming practices such as including everything by default in the initial installation and by including libraries that are actually systems that contain too many unrelated subsystems that become incorporated in other libraries that become inturn dependant and therefore contribute to the bloat and inability to support the older/smaller systems. The idea of MODULES in the kernel to support the newer features and abilities of the new hardware and modules with the ability to support the existing/older legacy hardware is being bastardized/usurped by the dependency hell library mess we get by building too many 'default' layers of installed programs and features.
One way that might be solved would be to have a minimal installation with a mostly 'naked' system that loads a bare system that utilizes whatever hardware it can detect (eg network, monitor, sound, etc) and then OFFERS a post installation session where the installation can be completed 'as is', 'Business office oriented', 'Multimedia oriented','experimental', ...etc where people can add the stuff like Beagle, Pulse audio (for those that want to experiment), the latest version of Gnome or KDE as opposed to the stable and proven version of 3.5.x or whatever beta/alpha versions the devs would like to push for testing.
The idea is that you don't make a release that contains a big glob of defaults that are 'bleeding edge' or untried packages and certainly not packages that replace well tried and stable versions as a default. Such bleeding edge packages should go into the postinstallation session if the user wishes to install them.
I liked your idea of any packages that *are* made defaults are made so by incorporating a STUB library AND whatever additional library or libraries needed to support the package. That way, only the stub need be retained in the distro, all others can be removed because all other dependencies go through the stub....kinda like an API.
So, SuSE was worth saving....still should be, don't you think?
The 'bloat' is something I've noticed for a while now and simply kept forgetting to comment on. I'm all for saving and supporting OpenSUSE if the bloat thing can actually be nipped in the bud and your ideas utilized...because they make sense. -- If guns kill people then... - Pencils mispell words. - Cars make people drive drunk. - Spoons make people overeat. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org