Subject: Bug#3013: elvis is too granular and has short description

From: Bill Mitchell <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 1 Jun 1996 08:10:11 -0700 (PDT)

On Fri, 31 May 1996, Bruce Perens wrote:

>> Our general policy is not to have x and nox versions of things.
>
>I can confirm this. We broke the xlib package out of the rest of X
>so that we could install X-optional programs on non-X systems without
>the need for no-X versions of the packages.

I guess I missed that discussion.

>> Where have we articulated that policy?
>
>It was the consensus of the group some time ago when we made this change.
>It belongs in the develper guidelines.
>
>> In any case, I disagree with it in this case.  I intend to continue to
>> offer both the X11 and non-X11 versions of elvis.
>
>Aw com'on. It's the only X and no-X package pair left in the entirety of
>Debian. All of the rest are gone as far as I can tell.
>
>> The distribution maintainers can choose to reject the offered packages
>> if they so desire.
>
>Lighten up. We're not going to reject the packages, but we might attempt
>to convince you that one of them is redundant.

I'll think about it.  However, I can easily imagine user system
where the user does not wish to run X11, wants a vi editor, and
prefers elvis.  I've been in that precise situation myself.  In
such a situation, installing a 230 Kb elvisx11 executable seems
preferable to installing 1.7 Mb of otherwise unneeded files from
the xlib just package just in order to be able to install and run
the 255 Kb elvisx11 executable without using any of its x11
functionality.

Sorry about the abrupt tone.  I've been rushing replies to email
out over the last several days in batches of 30 messages or so
during 15 minute email-check breaks.  This particular response got
squeezed out during one of those short breaks.

>[...]
>Is Ian still maintaining Emacs? I think it's a good idea to not have
>editors conflict because of ctags. I think we should just make up one
>definitive version of ctags and have the editor packages not install their
>own versions.

He's not.  I got that info from the Maintainer field of the emacs package
I had installed.  There's been a recent maintainer change, and I'm now
in contact with the new maintainer via email.  I expect that we'll quickly
agree on an approach to resolve this long-standing conflict over ctags
between the elvis and emacs packages.

---

From: "Brian C. White" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 01 Jun 1996 13:57:08 -0400

> >the need for no-X versions of the packages.

Could we add a a few lines to the "xlib" description stating that this
package is necessary on both X and non-X installations as well as the
reason why?

I think having a "(for both X and non-X systems)" in the single-line
description would also be a good idea.

It should probably also be moved out of the "x11" directory and into
"base" or something.  Otherwise, if somebody avoids the "x11" section
altogether, dependancy problems will arise.

                                        Brian
                               ( [email-masked] )

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
    In theory, theory and practice are the same.  In practice, they're not.

---

From: Stephen Early <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 1 Jun 1996 20:43:55 +0100 (BST)

> description would also be a good idea.

I don't particularly want to add to the single line description, but I can
certainly add a note to the extended description that xlib may be required
by some programs which have both X and non-X modes. 

> altogether, dependancy problems will arise.

I think it should stay in the x11 directory. People who need it will
download it; I expect most people will be working from complete copies of
the archive anyway, or fetching the bits that they need automatically by
ftp. 

Steve Early
[email-masked]

---

From: Ian Jackson <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 3 Jun 96 15:03 BST

Bill Mitchell writes ("Re:  Bug#3013: elvis is too granular and has short description"):
...
> the 255 Kb elvisx11 executable without using any of its x11

Indeed, I can see this user's point of view.  However, we have to
trade off this user's disk space against the time and disk space
involved in having another package in the distribution.  The x11
vs. nox packages were generally very confusing to users, which is one
of the reasons they were phased out, and they made selection of which
packages to install much more complicated than the current situation
(which essentially involves having one redundant library).

Remember that almost all Linux systems nowadays have Emacs installed,
(however much you may hate it (-:) and that our Emacs requires xlib
anyway.

You only save the overhead by having two versions of elvis if you have
*no* other optionally-X-based programs on the system.

I think that a better thing to do, rather than splitting the elvis
package into two parts, would be to produce a stub X11 library that
could be installed in place of the `real' xlib.

> [ctags and emacs]

That's great, thanks.

Ian.