Software/HD ecology (was Re:...Bug in Emacs 21.3.50)

[Ajanta <ajanta@no.spam>]

Stefan Monnier <foo@acm.com> wrote:

> The size of emacs/lisp/language is about 700KB here.  Peanuts. 
>...
> The amount of space used up by the other emacs/lisp/international features
> (mostly support for various charsets) is less than 4MB.  Not worth
> the trouble.
> ...
> HD space is not expensive enough to justify wasting any time on this.
 
First of all, thank you for all the help. Secondly, I do have a
slightly different philosophical perspective on unneeded disk clutter,
perhaps rooted in my familarity with the third world. 

You see, people in the 3rd world produce much less trash than say the
US. And their urban poor actually "recycle" most of it. Yet, without
systematic and uncompromising management, it still keeps adding up, and
their cities are living hell compared to American cities that in fact
generate a lot more garbage. 

The difference is in constant sorting and processing, of even the
smallest piece of paper or plastic, shall we say of even a single
peanut shell? :) 

In fact many 3rd world people show remarkably similar attitude: the
Forest/River/Beach is so big and I am just throwing one candy wrapper,
what's the big deal?

To make a long story short I believe all programs should come with
tools to minimize unnecessary clutter and also to safely and completely
uninstall themselves if asked.

A