It is because emacs is a large program (108M installed) that many people do not use, so it was separated into its own package set to make it easy to exclude (and excluding emacs should not break anything). The same situation exists with the t/ series, which only contains a few packages that some may not use and take up a lot of space. tcl/ and y/ take up relatively little space but again they are made easy to exclude because a lot of people have no use for them and excluding them won't (shouldn't?) break anything. They are not separated to make things magically work when you *include* them -- basically they exist to make paring down an install very easy (which is why kde/ and xfce/ have their own package sets). Arguing this point is like arguing that selecting xap/ should automatically select x/ since applications in xap/ do not work without x/. This isn't how the installer works -- it assumes that, if you are not doing a full installation, you know what you are doing.

It is listed more for people who don't want it than for people who do.

2 members found this post helpful.

Then I guess the people who do want it will know what to do when they don't get it.

But then how is a full installation defined? What do you have to leave out? As I have mentioned already, our main family computer is running Slackware and has done for a number of years but the user accounts are running XFCE (not for hardware reasons either, it is an i3 quadcore with 4GB RAM and a 1 TB HD). KDE and KDEi were omitted on install so therefore it is not a full install. Or is it? Does KDE and/or XFCE count but anything less doesn't?

Reading back through this thread I have to say the post by GazL,

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...3/#post4921068

makes sense to me.