Believe me, I hate having to download 10 perl modules just to get anything done. I'm not suggesting that we should gut the module tree by default. Rather, I'm suggesting that perhaps we need to clean house a little bit.
Well, that's more or less the same thing, isn't it?
pike --module_check myapp.pike
You seem to be missing the following modules:
Foo.bar Gazonk.client
Would you like to try to locate them?
This is the situation i dread, yes.
I have trouble buying that argument. Besides, is it so hard to add "pike -x monger" commands to your installation script? I get that you're convinced that everyone needs SDL and GL. I'm not. Perhaps we can just move on?
No, it's not needed by everyone. On the other hand, as an example SDL is a whopping total of 2800 lines of CMOD-code, most of which is documentation, and it takes about 1.5 seconds to compile on my computer with optimizations (just checked, arguments -O3 -mcpu=pentiumpro).
My point of view is that it's pointless to remove things just because it's 'clean' to have a small distribution. It will not make pike easier to maintain if we move things from the main repository, quite the oposite, actually, and the download will be some 100K smaller if we remove SDL _and_ GL.
It is OK not to include them in binary packages (such as the debian packages) since the dependencies is extreme for those modules (SDL depends on GL and GTK, GTK depends on half the world), but removing them from source distributions seems rather pointless.
Most of the module size (for almost all modules) is the refdoc and configure scripts, btw. Removing the per-C-module 'configure' scripts would shrink the pike distribution quite handily. And having a separate 'pike-refdoc' package (can be done by post-processing) would shrink pike a lot too.