[Mageia-dev] base system size for next beta1

[Pascal Terjan]

On Fri, Mar 18, 2011 at 08:05, andre999 <andr55 at laposte.net> wrote:
> In principle, I think it should be something required by virtually any
> working Mageia system.
>
> I notice  that there is a "basesystem-minimal" and a "basesystem", which
> adds requires "kernel" and "bootloader" ?!
> (Both of which seem kind of essential ;) )

Not if you want to create a chroot, you can then have a Mageia system
without a kernel or bootloader

> We should probably drop the distinction. (They are in the same source task
> package anyway.)
> If we keep the distinction, we could make "basesystem" optional, and include
> not-absolutely-necessary-but-almost type packages.  This would make it
> easier to reduce "basesystem-minimal" in size.
> (We could then maybe change the names to "basesystem" and "basesystem-plus"
> ? )
>
> At first glance, most of the requires seem pretty basic to any realistic
> minimal Linux system.
> The only thing I notice that is optional and somewhat big is vim (some 20M),
> but some sort of editor is needed.  And it is pretty standard in *nix type
> environments.  (Not my favorite, but even I know how to use vim.)
> We could always find an alternative, but it has to function without X.

The point is not to check what is required directly by the package but
what is required by that dependencies
i.e. urpmq -d basesystem-minimal to check if something strange gets pulled in

> We could save a lot of space without the bootloader and the kernel, but that
> would make it _really_ hard to get up and running :)
>
> In sum, it's not apparent how we could save much space.
>
> my (meandering) 2 cents :)
>
> --
> André
>