On Wednesday 06 August 2008 13:58, Larry Stotler wrote:
On Wed, Aug 6, 2008 at 4:35 PM, John Andersen wrote:
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No. I'd rather not have to install support for hardware I can't use on a particular machine. Since I'm not a programming, I have no idea how those libraries work.
Why don't you just ignore the stuff? Is it really getting in the way of anything you want or need to do?
I just don't understand why someone would program in a hardware dependency in a program in order to add a possible functionality to that program.
Dependency management in large software programs or systems is one of the most onerous aspects and it's vert often easier _not_ to produce minimal configurations in every or even most cases.
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I never said to get rid of the packages. I would just like to see more devs consider what people will actually use before forcing a dependency.
What is the down-side of a spurious dependency? A little disk space occupied. The ratio of OS and application data to other data on systems is going down all the time, making the overhead of loose dependency management less significant all the time.
What's the old saying - 80% of users only use 20% of the features. That's where a lot of the code bloat comes from.
"Code bloat" is a bugbear for people who don't have to minimize it. What are they called? Oh, yeah: Pundits. Just ignore the stuff. It's not harming you.
That's why I had to have 2GB for SuSE in 1999 where 98 could make do wuth 250-500MB.
And what percentage of your hard drive was it before compared to now? You're complaining about a non-issue. This is a classic of computer critic nonsense. Computers do more now over an ever widening hardware base. The kind of minimalism you seem to want is just not economically justifiable.
Not everyone has the newest and faster hardware.
But many do. Optimizing separate configurations for old and new alike is a lot of work for no change in functionality. It's not worth it.
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Randall Schulz -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org