Installing VIM installs lots of other stuff

[Daniel Jensen]

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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