Dale Scheetz wrote: > > > already a lot of packages that overwhelms the newcommer. I used to lose > > a lot of time when I was installing for the first time a Debian, only > > because of browsing our packages. And if we drop the dependencies, we > > will look exactly like RH: we will have a bunch of packages that > > installs and then don't work. > > While I agree it would be stupid, the part about RH is just FUD.
Hmmm, My history with Linux started 1 year ago was like this: Slackware -> RH -> Debian. I ended with Debian for a couple of reasons. What I remember about RH was that a bunch of packages were broken (it was on the time RH released RH 5.0). Since then, I didn't check RH (why should I :), so maybe the part about RH is a bit FUD. The main point was that Debian looks to be more stable than RH and if we drop those dependencies just to let contrib go in main we will really get a lot of broken packages. And keeping them toghether while non-free is somewhere else may look well from political point of view but it will help in no way the end user. Even worse, some newbies will set apt to check only main and contrib, find a lot of packages with missing dependencies and start to ask themselves "Why do I need such a distro that is so havely broken ?". Because this is what they'll see: set apt check the main and contrib, as they are told they should do, but still get some of the software listed that cann't be installed. This is my opinion, anyway. Ionutz
