Debian, and its shortcomings

[jc at trillian.mit.edu (John Chambers)]

Bob Keyes <bob at sinister.com> writes:

> As I am installing debian 3.0 right now, I decided to double-check the
> statements I made earlier about its extraneous packages. With the tasks of
> conventional unix server and C/C++ , it does indeed install emacs20 and
> emacs-common, along with ispell, libfreetype6, libglib, libgtk, libpng,
> libxaw, pdksh, lpr, python, wenglish, xfree86, xlibsm abd zsh -- all
> packages that are probably quite useful but certainly not appropriate for
> the base install of a convential unix server.

Well, I'd expect a server machine  to  include  all  the  usual  text
editors,  because you need them to handle config files and logs.  And
it would be handy to have as many shells  and  languages  like  perl,
python,  tcl,  etc.,  because  you  need things like that to properly
manage a server.  Things like  C/C++  and  their  libraries,  or  the
printer  packages  should  probably  be  kept separate so they can be
installed only when needed.  (Though I always feel somewhat  crippled
on a machine without a C compiler.  ;-)


--
   O
 <:#/> John Chambers
   +   <jc at trillian.mit.edu>
  / \  <jmchambers at rcn.com>