[tex-live] heresy

[Karl Berry]

    I wonder what people feel about breaking the "cm" package in two, so
    that the Metafont sources are a separate package (which I can omit)?
    would that cause howls of protest?

I see no harm in it.

    or shall I not have "cm" at all, and just have "lmodern"?

You still have to have cm, or basically no existing documents will be
processable.  LM is not a drop-in replacement for CM.  It doesn't
have a cmr10.tfm, for instance, and anyway the metrics are slightly
different (and better).

    Realistically, are .afm files ever used these days by normal users?
    I mean the .afm files for cm, lmodern etc

I can't imagine why.  I don't ever use them, at least.