> > I'd anticipate having a couple of different jumbo-packs, actually.
> > An `essentials' one with ssh, perl, pine, emacs, top, etc.,
> Here we see one of the problems with jumbo-packs.  Only two of the five
> "essentials" you list are things I'd even wast^H^H^H^Hdevote any disk
> space to, never mind consider "essential".

Few people who sat down and analyzed their needs would even be likely to
agree on which of the two he meant ;-).  For completely indiscriminate users,
only an "everything" package seems to make sense (OK, maybe you can leave out
SPICE and NEC2 :-) ), but that would be gigantic.  Lots of different tasteful
collections are also going to use a lot of disk space on the server.

It might be better to do the "jumbo packs" by wrapping the fetch process in
a shell script (if you can ftp a jumbo pack, you can ftp a bunch of individual
packs).  This makes it easier to cut out things you just don't want (it's much
easier to edit a shell script than a tar file ;-), and also makes it easier
to support some scheme for telling an automatic installation program that
you have hand-built, say, perl so that any packages that express a dependancy
on it won't either fail to load or fetch a redundant and/or misconfigured
copy.  (Of course, you have to make sure that the fetched package can find
your copy of perl, but again, that's what symbolic links are for.)