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Date: Mon, 13 May 2013 08:44:50 -0600
From: Daniel Jensen <jensend@iname.com>
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To: cygwin@cygwin.com
Subject: Re: Installing VIM installs lots of other stuff
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> Providing the functionality of some obscure, barely used project is not
> a stated goal for Cygwin.  No one here is interested in adapting
> ourselves to people's expectations for the project if the expectations
> have nothing to do with the goals of the project.

??

unxutils is just a bundle of win32 binaries of stuff like grep, find, 
less, patch, make, etc. It's just one representative of many people's 
attempts to provide basic *nix tools, ranging from every random person 
out there hosting a win32 build of grep to the MSYS folks. There's 
nothing 'obscure' or 'barely used' about this goal. It's just a more 
modest version of the first of Cygwin's 'stated goals.' ("Cygwin is a 
collection of tools which provide a Linux look and feel environment for 
Windows.")

Yes, cygwin is more than that. That would be the 'on steroids' part. 
People who want more tools and more compatibility than they can get from 
these simpler bundles of tools are going to need to look at cygwin instead.

But those who need everything and the kitchen sink are, honestly, 
frequently not going to be well-served by cygwin anyways.

As I said before, I'm quite aware that there will be plenty of times 
when the right thing to do for cygwin as a project will be to go ahead 
and enable some more of a package's optional dependencies. Some users' 
desire for niche functionality may outweigh other users' desire for a 
lighter, simpler cygwin install that doesn't need to be updated every 
day. But the concerns of the latter group of users are not simply 
irrelevant; there is a tradeoff that needs to be weighed. Also, whenever 
it's possible to meet both needs by making extra functionality somehow 
available without the hard dependencies, it's worth considering.

Even for the full-fledged distributions this is still a concern. In the 
present instance, you'll notice that many distributions have a 
vim-minimal package which depends on libc and little else, and even for 
the full-fat vim Fedora made an effort not too long ago to remove 
dependencies on ruby and python (though not perl) - 
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=752785.

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