On Thu, Sep 11, 2014 at 07:41:19PM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote:
>
> > * telnet: dead for 19 years. Used only by those who misspell 'nc' and hope
> > for no 0xff bytes.
> > * wamerican: what use is a wordlist with no users?
>
> Both of these fall under the "anyone familiar with UNIX would go 'where
> the hell is X' if the package isn't installed" provision, I think. Yes,
> nc is better than telnet, but telnet is part of a *lot* of people's finger
> memory, and I think removing the package violates the principle of least
> surprise here. It's not very large.
A large number of these packages would fall into this category.
Arguably this would include dc and m4. (Trivia fact: dc predates the
C programming language, and it has macros, conditionals, and looping
constructs. :-)
That being said, if there are Debian users who are not Unix-heads,
they aren't going to miss any of these. What if we create a tasksel
task called "Unix" that installs these traditional Unix commands from
the BSD 4.x era? It would include dc, m4, /usr/dict/words, telnet,
etc.
> wamerican provides /usr/share/dict/words, which is widely used in a
> variety of strange places you wouldn't expect, like random test suites.
True, but that's a developer thing. The argument can be used for m4
and dc as well --- that they can be used all sorts of places you don't
expect.
- Ted
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