there are two degrees of seperation: one is whe way things are distributed and the other is the way things are maintained.
the main pike cvs tree is about code that is maintained by the pike team and whos copyright is owned by IDA.
modules.gotpike.org and other places have stuff mainained elsewhere and owned by others.
currently what is maintained together is also distributed together. however this does not have to be the case. the current debian packages are split up, and show that seperation is possible without changing the way things are maintained.
following this, seperation of the pike core would simply mean to split the pike download into seperate files where a user can pick and choose what he/she needs or wants. a minimal pike that only includes the bare necessities to run pike code would certainly be nice to have.
otoh, pike developers rely on a lot of things being available. in the #pike channel on irc i lately hear a lot of people who like pike exactly because its distribution is so inclusive and they do not have to bug the user to get certain modules installed befor their code can run.
as a result, if the distribution gets split up it will be important to make it easy to identify missing components and make it easy to install them (preferably though the monger)
in the short run splitting up things can only mean to provide additional download targets. which means additional work. not that i want to discurage anyone, perhaps the whole thing is as easy as adding a few make targets that will build several pike packages instead of a single one.
to conclude: instead of arguing which modules should be in the core, the more interresting question is, how to we actually implement the split. only after that is solved we can start asking how should the split packages on the pike site look like.
the following would be nice: a make target that creates split packages according to a simple config file which defines the packages and what goes inside:
could also be in makefile format: all: (well, everything :-) core: the pike binary itself minimal: core, stdin(the bare core) default: minimal, gtk, ... reccomended: suggested: ...
and so on, then everyone can group packages to their liking and the question of what does into the default is limited to those packages which are actually distributed from pike.ida.liu.se and which go into distributions.
(later, some standard for that could say: if you package pike for the general public it should contain the following if the package wants to call itself a full pike install, if you do not have these you must warn the user that your package is incomplete, but that's future, lets solve the technical problems first)
greetings, martin.