> libwebkit is about as light as you're going to get a web browser framework ...
... I never said anything else. But in the context your statement is irrelevant. The question is whether it was a good idea to make Webkit a central and irremovable (!) element of a distro that wants to be small.
> Most Distros include it now ...
... even if that were true, so what? Most distros come on CDs or even DVDs that are full to the brim. You're comparing apples and oranges because SliTaz is decidedly not "most distros". It's one of only a handful of distros that come on an ISO image smaller than 100 MB.
> It's easy to say it's unneeded, but I don't see you suggesting alternatives.
... strange that you don't see it because the answer is implicit in my previous post and it has been debated over and over in this forum at a time when SliTaz 4 was still under development. But then as now there were some who "didn't see alternatives", who evaded the issues at hand, who changed the subject and who answered questions that nobody had asked ... and the debates somehow fizzled out without ever coming to any meaningful conclusion.
In simple terms the answer is this: There was absolutely nothing wrong with previous versions of SliTaz, which for local administration and configuration tasks sported a number of small script based tools with a friendly GTK frontend. And it was a poor decision (to put it mildly) to replace all of this with one integrated browser based frontend ... unneccessary complexity was introduced and simplicity, modularity and transparency went out of the window. If one can't remove Parted/GParted without ripping out a configuration tool that's central to the entire distro then there's something wrong with the concept of that distro.
It's hard to believe all of this happened to please a small crowd of conformists, fanboys and ex-Ubuntu users who never understood or cared much for core values such as "Simple, Small and Lightweight". I think sixofeight raises some very interesting questions in his previous post, to which I'd like to add this one: By which criteria do we measure the success of a non-commercial project like a GNU/Linux distribution? Is popularity really what a specialist distro like SliTaz should be aiming for? Doesn't popularity ultimately always corrupt core values and lead to the loss of a distinct profile?
P.S.: Trixar, in case you're going to post a reply, don't remind me again of the fact that there were some minor issues with gtkdialog in previous versions of SliTaz. I am aware of this. But these issues could have been easily resolved without such a radical change of direction for the entire distro.
