Re: Cleaning the distrib

[David Webster <cog@seul.org>]

On Mon, 30 Apr 2001, Jean Francois Martinez wrote:

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

keep vim, it's mroe popular, AFAICT. perhaps link nvi to it. if they're
both vi clones, then they should act similarly.

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

yep.

[...]
> Window Maker:  Frankly I don't know.

Can't help, sorry. Still don't use X.

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

probably true.

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

I know new users who have found it works for them. However, if we have a
nother program that works as well, if not better, then new users tend not
to be too picky about the program they use.

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

I'd guess keeping them would aid the transfer of people from Windows,
since netscape mailer is in use on that platform, AFAIK.

> elm: Remove.  We already have mutt and pine

I'm not so sure. I'd probably have named 3 command line mailers (excluding
'mail') that have large addament user groups. Pine, Mutt and Elm. (prolly
in that order). Removing Elm will cause problems (annoyances, more
likely) for people who use it, what benefits will removing this package
gain?

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

Yeah, keep.

> lynx:  Remove.  links seems better.

lynx is used in quite a few shell scripts that I know of/use. It'd break
them; unless links can use the same command line syntax, and be linked to
lynx, which I doubt would work.

I'd suggest keeping it for compatability. No point breaking stuff.

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

Yeah, why not. I prefer lynx, personally, but that's prolly because I only
installed links yeasterday....

HTH
David