[Freedombox-discuss] On small programs

[Sandy Harris]

It seems fairly obvious that we want the Freedom Box software
to run on limited systems but to provide a range of functions.

To what extent does that mean we should be aiming at
making everything small? In particular, are their places
where we should the smallest alternatives available rather
than the usual choices? Does that even matter in the context
of Debian, where the packages system offers many choices
anyway?

In some cases, aiming small would be a major change,
for example using dietlibc (http://www.fefe.de/dietlibc/)
rather than glibc or Minix (http://www.minix3.org/) rather
than Linux. The size payoff might be large, but that is
not entirely clear. The amount of work involved almost
certainly would be substantial.

In other cases, it is less of a disruption and more easily
handled with the standard package utilities. Checking
on my Ubuntu box, I see sendmail, postfix and qmail
are available; for all I know, there are more. There
are probably multiple web servers, certainly multiple
borwsers, multiple databases, and so on.

Do we need to think about which of these should be
the defaults for an fbox server? My guess would
be Linux with dietlibc used wherever possible, with
one of the variants of djbdns, qmail and some
tiny web server.