Cleaning the distrib

[Jean Francois Martinez <jfm2@club-internet.fr>]

Removing superfluous software

Commercial distributions have to include gobs of superfluous and
second class software for a simple reason: all things being equal
sales are better for a four CD distribution than for one with only
two.  And that is why you find yourself with ten window managers, five
mail clients and so on.  This creates many problems: some of this
software is not top notch, some of it is unmaintained (and could
introduce seurity holes), user gets confused by too much software and
also if he stumbles upon four mediocre programs in a row then he could
get a bad impression of Linux.

For those reasons I think it is in user interest if we try to include
only the best programs for Indy.  Ideally only one program for doing
one thing: the best one.  But we live in real world: sometimes it is
not clear which is the best one, sometimes they have different
ecological niches and you cannot drop programs who are popular since
doing so creates problems to many people.


Here is a list of programs I propose to keep or remove.  You can vote
on them.  Or you can tell the whole concept of removing programs is
silly and you like to try many programs.


EDITORS:
--------

vim, nvi: We have to keep ONE vi clone because VI is too popular.  But
why two clones.

Emacs: keep, too popular and we need it for Emacspeak

Xemacs: Remove.  I wanted it replacing Emacs but Emacspeak doesn't
work with it

gedit:  Keep for now.  Unless nobody uses it, likes it.



WINDOW MANAGERS:
----------------

twm: remove, crappy looks, crappy ergonomy, users shoot themselves in
the foot with it (Gnome's control center allows to select it).  And
Fvwm is leaner.

enlightenment: keep.  It allows to make Windows people jealous.  But
make what is needed for allowing it to run alone.  Without gnome.

fvwm2: Keep.  For small boxes.  Alternatively replace it by fvwm1 or
by one of the modern light-weight WMs/

Window Maker:  Frankly I don't know.


MAIL CLIENTS:
------------

MH, XMH, EXMH, nmh:  Remove.  Obsolete.  Not evry popular AFAIK

Balsa: Remove.  It does not really work at least for me.  As soon as Evolution is in Indy I think we should drop balsa.

mozilla-mail, netscape-communicator (ie mail client): Remove.  Memory pigs.
Unfortuntaely probably too popular.

elm: Remove.  We already have mutt and pine

mutt: Keep.  Popular


BROWSERS:
--------

Netscape: keep for now.  It is the more poorly written program in
history but we don't have a half decent graphic browser.

Mozilla: Remove.  It is still worse than netscape.  Keep the rendering
engine and use galion as front end.

lynx:  Remove.  links seems better.

links:  Keep.  Text browser like lynx but it renders frames.



Text formatters:
----------------

Lout: remove.  It seems it is good but TeX is far more popular


Automounters:
------------

Am-utils:

automount: I cannot compare them.  They pretty seem to do the same thing


Productivity:  
------------

Ical:  Remove.  Gnome and KDE ship better alternatives


Misc:
----

comsat: Remove.  There are better methods to check mail

rgrep: Remove. Recursive search in directories.  Command line.  Does
what "find dir | xargs grep" do and o it faster