[plug] RE: plug RedHat 5.1

[The Thought Assassin]

On Fri, 12 Jun 1998, John Summerfield wrote:
> On Fri, 12 Jun 1998, The Thought Assassin wrote:
> > On Thu, 11 Jun 1998, John Summerfield wrote:
> > > On Thu, 11 Jun 1998, The Thought Assassin wrote:
> > > > IMHO, if a package has a priority (i.e. required, important, standard,
> > > > optional) and clear dependencies, that is all the newbie needs to know.
> Choices aren't always so easy: one of my first installs was to a 486DX33,
> 8 Mb and 170 Mb.
> Diskspace prevents installing anything not essential to the tasks the
> machine is to perform.
> How was I (as a Unix neophyte) to decide whether to install this?
> Name        : sed                         Distribution: Hurricane
> Summary     : GNU Stream Editor
> 
> There are lots of editors: why would I want this one?
Because it was listed in section "Important" and because you'd be able to
install very little else without installing this?
If that's not the case, then Redhat have got a lot to answer for.

> > The first time I installed Linux, it was as simple as the above.
> > I didn't remove any packages that were listed as "standard", I just added
> > some packages from lower priorities and whatever they depended on.
> > I got a few conflicts, so I removed a few things I had selected. (but
> > nothing from important or above)
> 
> Getting a working system isn't the issue: that much was easy. Choosing the
> products that I would find useful wasn't.
> Yes, I've found I need sed - not because I wanted to use it, but because
> some scripts I want to use use it.
I am beginning to suspect that this is a major deficiency of redhat
(though perhaps they have improved things in the interim) When I first
installed Debian, I never got the choice to uninstall sed, unless I used
the "force" methods which I did not know at the time.
sed was in a package marked "important" or "required", so I knew not to
touch, and if I had touched it, it would have given me an enormous list of
other things that could no longer be installed. If one of those had seemed
important to me (as in, an application I wanted as an end-user), then I
would have made sure I selected sed for install.
If I could run all of the things that were important to me without
installing sed, then I would have seen this and delete sed if I so chose.
Does Redhat make no such effort to guide first-time installers?

> If you used any unix implementation significantly before installing Linux,
> you opinion doesn't count because you were never in the position of a
> novice installing Linux.
I certainly hadn't. I'd used a zsh on a OSF1 server for basic internet
stuff, but nothing else, and no administration whatsoever.

-Greg