Re: mc in fedora 10

["Yury V. Zaytsev" <yury shurup com>]

On Fri, 2009-11-13 at 12:35 -0500, MK wrote:

> I understand that!  However, I would not call 8gb "just enough
> packages to get a minimal self-sustainable working system".

RHEL DVDs are quite well-balanced and mc is included in there (however,
they still contain a fraction of what's available online), while e.g.
Ubuntu provides a ~500 Mb CDs exactly of this kind.

I imagine that the DVDs you're talking about were somehow automatically
built from download statistics with no human interaction at all and the
fact that mc was not included in there does not imply that its regarded
as non-essential or whatever. In fact it does not imply anything at all.

>  In other words, that DVD set is intended on some level to be a
>  "complete" repository.  

Maybe you think so, but it does not make it true. Install DVDs were
introduced just to spare some time for people on slow internet
connections so that they can install more packages directly during the
system setup. They were never intended as a complete snapshot of
everything that is supported by the distribution.

There used to be some DVDs by Debian like 5 years ago, which were the
complete cut of the repo, but they were specifically labeled as such and
I guess they don't to it anymore.

In fact, install DVDs do not make any sense nowadays, that's why I
personally always download the CDs and pull everything else I might need
from the net along with the eventual updates.

> My impression at that time was that the online  redhat database had
>  taken a definate turn for the worse in terms of
>   functionality/user-friendliness, I suppose because the use of yum
>  over  the net had come to replace the web frontend.  

Your impression is wrong. The difference between yum/aptitude etc. and
the online database is that the package managers do depresolving for you
and the latter does not. You are never supposed to use rpm directly
(just as dpkg in the Debian world) unless you know very well what you
are doing. 

But apparently you don't understand what depresolving is. To give you an
example I suggest you to try to install X + Gnome with plain rpm or dpkg
on a headless machine previously set up with a minimal installation. 

> Basically, my point is that most linux users do not use mc and it
>  occupies an obscure place in most major distros.  

That depends on what you would call a major distro and what would you
define as an obscure place. E.g. in RHEL (what can be more major than
that?) I guess it's included on the install medium and it can be
installed with a package manager from base repo in most of the distros I
know (FC, Ubuntu, Arch, ...).

If you don't use the package manager as you are supposed to and fiddle
with some lower-level stuff instead, you get what you are asking for.

> Vis. "waste days on recompiling packages from older source archives"
>  -- no, I just find the homepage, download the source tarball, and
>  compile it according to  my preferences.  I do not have a hard time
>  determining and accounting  for prereqs.  

I guess you have never compiled anything requiring more than 3 libraries
then. Try a static build of VLC (or, say, qtiplot, anyone?) for starters
and than report back.
 
-- 
Sincerely yours,
Yury V. Zaytsev