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RE: Installing VIM installs lots of other stuff


You'll note, however, that for most distros Perl doesn't depend on openssl, libssp, etc.

Also, including extra optional stuff as dependencies is considerably more acceptable when you're installing a primary OS. We expect a Fedora or Arch install to need 10GB and daily security updates. That's the unfortunate reality of linux today. For cygwin, on the other hand, people's expectations are different. A lot of people want cygwin to act like "unxutils on steroids" and just give them some basic functionality to supplement Windows. Not everybody is trying to make KDE on Cygwin-X their primary desktop.

Last year I complained when libcurl suddenly started pulling in the entire kerberos stack (9 packages), presumably due to changing the compile time option to include it. Yaakov dismissed my complaint as irrelevant because disk space is cheap. I didn't feel like arguing the point then, but the only thing I think of when I hear "kerberos" is the many many high-publicity vulnerabilities in the kerberos stack over the years. If you're putting cygwin on a bunch of machines just to ensure they all have access to a few basic utilities, keeping update worries to a minimum would be nice.

I know that for a lot of packages the packagers will have legitimate reasons to decide that some users' desire for increased functionality overrides other users' desires for a small, possibly even portable, cygwin install with minimal update needs. Such is life. But please don't just completely dismiss the latter group of users' concerns as irrelevant.

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