On Tue, Sep 05, 2006 at 04:42:19PM -0400, Mike A. Harris wrote:
The total disk space used by all X drivers combined is extremely small, both in terms of megabytes, and in terms of dollars of disk space. Small enough on the scale of care, to be totally negligible.
That is a value judgement. It may well be accurate for us folks in North America or Europe. However, it may not be accurate for someone struggling in a non-profit, or for someone in Africa or Asia.
This sort of decision, across a lot of packages, has lead to Fedora bloat, making it less attractive to people on tight budgets. For another example, do we really need CD writing software in order to run gnome? Well, not if the machine doesn't have a CD burner.
To paraphrase Lyndon Johnson, a megabyte here, a megabyte there, pretty soon it adds up.
What we need is a generic dummy application. It pops up, or prints to stdout, as appropriate, something like, "Sorry but %s is not installed. Please install it, as root, like so: 'yum install %s'. Thank you." where %s is the name of the app the user wanted.