Re: [gentoo-dev] removing the server profiles...

[Rich Freeman]

On Sat, Jan 19, 2013 at 3:26 AM, Ben de Groot <yngwin@g.o> wrote:
>
> People who do have printers can always enable it themselves. I don't
> see any reason for cups to be enabled by default, especially not on a
> minimal profile, and that includes the simple desktop profile. The kde
> and gnome profiles are expected to be more "complete".
>

Unless we plan on adding yet another profile for "normal" users I
think this is really pushing it.  I'm not sure I buy disabling it on
the default profile, let alone the desktop one.

Yes, I'm sure some people don't own printers.  However, that figure
has to be fairly low.  Yes, users who have printers can enable it, but
those without printers can also disable it.  I don't think I actually
know anybody who owns a computer but not a printer.  Frequency of use
has to count for something here.

Maybe we should have some kind of use-case to guide how we create each
profile.  I'm concerned that the default profile is going to turn into
something that isn't actually useful for anybody.  It will still be
too heavy for people who are running embedded, it will be way to light
for people who just want a computer that works, it won't have support
for things people need on servers, and so on.  If the "default"
profile isn't actually intended to be used by anybody we can be
up-front about that and then create a profile that actually can be
used.

For the desktop profile I think that it shouldn't pull in
KDE/Gnome-related deps/features (which are REALLY heavy), but
otherwise should be similar to what you'd get on any other
desktop-oriented distro (debian, ubuntu, kubuntu, xubuntu, mint, arch,
etc).  That generally means that the packages that are installed
should be fairly feature-complete, especially around things like
multimedia, etc.  Could you imagine ANY other desktop-oriented distro
not having printer support by default?

Rich