Time to kill the "diff" empty upgrade helper?

[Charles Wilson]

Charles Wilson wrote:
> Christopher Faylor wrote:
> 
>>> Not hurting, really.  More like just looking untidy.  I was thinking
>>> that it wouldn't be a bad idea to streamline "Base", and started with
>>> the most obvious target.  (I'm currently running without "diff",
>>> "ncurses", "readline" and "login", to test whether they are suitable
>>> candidates for un-"Base"-ing.)

Oh yeah, and the real reason I replied in this thread.  I've noticed a 
number of "upgrade helpers" -- like 'diff', but especially texmf/tetex. 
  I'm a reasonably clued-in cygwin user, but I haven't had tetex 
installed because I use MikTeX.  However, just the other day I found 
myself thinking, while staring at the package list, "How would I install 
cygwin TeX?  There's a half-dozen 'tetex*' packages, another half-dozen 
'texmf*' packages.  Which ones do I need?"

Then I **scrolled** over to the right, and saw that the texmf packages, 
and tetex-beta, were marked as 'upgrade helpers'.  Ah HA, thought I.  I 
don't need the texmf packages -- as a savvy cygwin user, *I* know what 
"upgrade helper" means -- it means that the packages were once called 
texmf, but have been renamed.  Given the limitations of old (current?) 
setup.exe, we need these empty 'upgrade helpers' to smooth the renaming 
process.

How many newbies know that?  Assuming they scrolled far enough to the 
right to see the 'upgrade helper' text, which isn't visible in the 
current chooser window w/o scrolling?

Sure, it won't HURT if they install all of texmf* and tetex*, since the 
empty upgrade helpers are negligible in size and have little effect on 
the installation.  But it's confusing to newbies.

Perhaps upgrade helpers should be in a category of their own, like
"Upgrade Helpers" with a description string  "Installed Automatically if 
needed; do not select manually"

Which brings me to another point: is it possible for the chooser to 
display sdesc strings (hardcoded by upset into setup.ini, perhaps?) for 
categories?

--Chuck