[ILUG] new major problem with linux: too many apps...

[Justin Mason]

John McDonnell said:

> yeah but the guy seems to be a bit of a dozy git. Don't want a web
> server? Then don't install it! I've grown accustomed to the amount of apps
> supplied with my dists and I wouldn't like to see them reduced so that to
> get a complete installation I'd have to get several boxes worth of stuff
> of spend half the week on freshmeat (assuming I can get through).

Yeah, IMHO it's an installer usability thing really.

I'd prefer to see them installed at least -- I hate crawling through CD
boxes looking for that distro disk, or worse, having to wait 'til the next
day to bring it home from work.

I think the worse problem is that, once they're installed, they can be
impossible to find.

UNIX systems used to have "apropos" or "man -k" to search for an
application -- if you wanted a hex editor, you could type "apropos hex"
and get:

  hexdump    (1)  - ascii, decimal, hexadecimal, octal dump
  xxd        (1)  - make a hexdump or do the reverse
  ascii      (7)  - the ASCII character set encoded in octal, decimal, and hexadecimal
  iso_8859-1 (7)  - the ISO 8859-1 character set encoded in octal, decimal, and hexadecimal
  iswxdigit  (3)  - test for hexadecimal digit wide character


But since then nobody seems to write manual pages anymore (I blame the
crappy GNU info format), and all of a sudden there's no guarantee there's
a manual page for any given application, so that way doesn't work.

Witness the recent stuff on the LWN letters page about "service", a handy
util that I'd say most Red Hat users have rewritten ;)

--j.