[Trisquel-devel] Ubuntu-specific packages to remove from repos

["Luis A. Morán Morales"]

On 01/04/2011 02:14 PM, roeplay at lavabit.com wrote:
> I was as careful as possible to make sure I only included superfluous
> packages that have no relevance to Trisquel.
>
> My "method" was simply to search for "ubuntu", "kubuntu", "xubuntu",
> "edubuntu", "lubuntu", "mythbuntu" and "ubuntu studio" in Synaptic and
> find the packages that are Ubuntu-specific.

Simply searching for the word "ubuntu" in Synaptic is far too 
indiscriminate a method to accomplish your goal of removing 
"superfluous" packages. What is the criteria exactly to decide what a 
superfluous package is? Defining such criteria should be (one of) the 
first step(s). I use several of the packages you listed, so they 
certainly aren't superfluous to me and to others who might use them. The 
same goes for metapackages, which can be rather useful and convenient. 
For instance, in a few clicks, users can effectively turn Trisquel into 
Ubuntu Studio, or change from GNOME to KDE, etc. To me, those 
capabilities/conveniences rank high on the practical considerations of 
choosing a fully free distro like Trisquel—it can do pretty much 
everything Ubuntu does without compromising my software freedom. So with 
that in mind, the process of determining what is or isn't a superfluous 
package should be carefully thought out.

I'd imagine that many of the packages on Trisquel's repos will say 
"ubuntu" in the name, considering that 1) this is an Ubuntu deriv, and 
2) it might not be the most convenient thing to do to rename every 
upstream package (especially unchanged ones). Wouldn't that create even 
more work by having to update the dependency lists of related packages 
in order to reflect the name changes?

-- 
Luis A. Morán Morales
https://identi.ca/lamm