I noticed the checkin of a new module the other day and was reminded that we're long overdue for a discussion of Pike distribution bloat. This has come up at the last two conferences, and we always "table" the discussion for later.
I think now is a good time to have it since we're not coming up on an impending new stable release. It seems to me that there are a fairly large number of modules distributed with Pike that have a corresponding low number of potential users. I'm not suggesting that the modules don't have merit, but am suggesting that perhaps the audience is so small that it becomes clutter to others. Does it really make sense to keep adding these modules to the core distribution when they could just as easily be distributed separately?
As it stands now, Pike distributions are 10MB, and take a painfully long amount of time to compile. I'm sure I'm not the only one who wonders why they have to configure and compile things like HTTPLoop and SDL... (just picking two that I'd remove, not that they're at the top of my list) I realize that there was a time when including things in the core was a necessary evil due to compilation difficulty, but that's not been the case for at least a year or two...
Any thoughts?
Bill