Re: [Dfey-nw-discuss] Re: Dogfish

[Connor Smith]

On Sat, 2009-07-18 at 15:29 +0000, Robert Leverington wrote: 
> On 2009-07-18, Robert Leverington wrote:
> > On 2009-07-18, Tim Dobson wrote:
> > > I suggest adding the following shell programs:
> > >
> > > mc nano vim emacs irssi bitchx finch screen mutt talk talkd
> > 
> > Will install the first lot now though as there seems to be a consensus.
> 
> All installed except talk, talkd, and bitchx (the latter due to not
> being in the repository).

I'd like to note (for transparency) that finch is in fact *not*
installed. The reason for this is that finch (pidgin's console
counterpart, for those who don't know) is a hugely bloated program. Of
course, those who know me well know that I consider basically every
program hugely bloated - but a number of other members agreed.
Obviously, it is easy to install finch if it turns out that a lot of
people do want it, but I believe it is too big to install just on the
off-chance that people use it.

To explain, installing finch on Debian requires a number of packages:
  * libgstreamer0.10-0
  * libpurple0
      * libavahi-client3
      * libavahi-common3
      * libdbus-1-3
      * libgadu3
      * libmeanwhile1
      * libnss3-1d
      * libsilc-1.1-2
      * libzephyr
  * pidgin-data

So finch even contains its own windowing system, DNS capabilities, audio
libraries, and quite a number of images and audio files. All in all, I
really don't think it's appropriate for a server. It would total maybe
100MB in size. If a lot of people want it I suppose we could install it,
but I think it's better if we don't, yet.

cls