 | | | Perception of bloat (was: security in general - I 'am a surprised) | Perception of bloat (was: security in general - I 'am a surprised) 2002-08-19 - By Christopher Wong
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On 17 Aug 2002, Jean Francois Martinez wrote:
> On Fri, 2002-08-16 at 19:00, Christopher Wong wrote:
> > It is indeed a fair comparison at the driver level. Think of what is
> > involved in setting up a printer, video card, network card or sound
> > card. Red Hat forces me to install drivers for every piece of hardware
> > on the planet. Windows has comparable hardware support, lets me
> > install only the drivers I need, and has a friendly user interface to
> > do so. It does not make me install 36MB of Omni printer drivers or
> > 14MB of Japanese fonts. This fine granularity is possible without
> > making me wade through a maze of twisty RPMs, all unalike.
> >
> > The problem is Red Hat 's one-size-fits-all use of RPMs as the atomic
> > unit for installation. Applications, libraries, drivers and fonts all
> > have to be shoehorned into this model. The result at the driver level
> > is over-coarse granularity and enforced bloat. The result at the
> > application level is over-fine granularity, an insomniac-curing sea of
> > RPMs and dependency hell. You argued that it is "not a fair
> > comparison ". It is not in the sense that Red Hat is using the same
> > tool for different jobs, and the result is something that is
> > uncompetitive at any level of abstraction.
>
> The problems is that many people in the computer industry seem to be
> unable to do maths.
>
> So here are some:
>
> 1) Cost of one G of disk space at current rates: around 4$ and dropping
Looks like somebody has not been following the thread. It started as a
security thread. Somebody suggested stripping away unused features and
cruft to reduce potential points of exploitation. My argument was that Red
Hat makes this difficult. For reasons I outlined above, bloat is enforced.
Nobody was talking about disk space.
An additional obstacle RPM adds to the minimalist approach is that
selective deleting of files breaks RPM verification. Perhaps some sort of
partial-RPM-installation feature might be useful.
Chris
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