Am Mon, 02 Aug 2010 15:31:47 +0200 schrieb Pierre Chapuis <catwell@archlinux.us>:
Just for information, the opposite point of view recently came up on the suckless mailing-list: http://lists.suckless.org/dev/1007/5256.html
I prefer Arch's approach but it is probably true that a large base system reduces the workload of package maintainers.
I don't know Source Mage, but I think that a large base system (as I understand this posting, all in one big package) has only disadvantages. It's far less flexible, wastes much more disk space for unneeded tools, makes a lot more work for the users and maintainers, because the base package - as I understand the posting - needs to be updated more often (a big package needs to be updated every time one small tool is updated), which forces the users to regularly download and the maintainers to regularly rebuild and upload a bigger package instead of sometimes down- and uploading a few much smaller packages, etc. Not really a good idea. Heiko