[Mageia-dev] installing minimal is not really that minimal

[Thierry Vignaud]

On 22 March 2012 13:20, Olav Vitters <olav at vitters.nl> wrote:
> I'm willing to assist when there are too big dependency chains. But, I
> don't get why in a minimal install it installs "Suggests:"? I can
> understand that it takes space on the DVD.

> But in a minimal install it
> should ignore the Suggests, no?

This option is only available for really minimal install.
But if you select anything else, you won't have the option.
So suggests will be used.
Eg: if you select just networking stuff.

And suggests are only half the issue.
Requires hurt too, especially library-requiring-tools-that-requires...

See the infamous  systemd | initscripts > lib64glib2.0_0 >
glib2.0-common > libgio > libgvfs >
libgnome-keyring > gnome-keyring > seahorse > libgpg > gnugpg > dirmngr
+ gnome-keyring > libgtk > gtk+ > colord > libcolord
+ libgvfs > libavahi > avahi
+ libgio > libfam > libgamin > gamin
+ libgio > libfuse > fuse
+seahore > libldap > openldap

They're suggests here but they're also requires
And having one gtk+ app can bring quite a lot of
stuff here b/c of:
- gvfs pulling avahi
- gio pulling gamin, fuse, gnome-keyring, gnugpg, dirmngr, seahhorse, openldap
- gtk+ pulling colord

Whereas most gtk+ apps don't need any of that.
And worse there're programs using glib for dbus (eg: systemd) but nothing
else, yet we end wio gio,gvfs,gtk+ then daemons

Some of these should be moved at top of the stack and be required
by task-foobar instead.
Any single of those was bring without the intention to hurt but
together they do hurt.

In the old days we could do a minimal install under 80M, now 525Mb is fine.
And those packages can have side effect : eg:
- avahi can prevent network to work
- too many "useless" services slow down the boot and makes mga looks
  awful against other distros
- ...

> I think we should have something which tracks these things
> automatically.

+1
But I've already asked for this once but got no answer.

> Meaning:
> - a way to see the dependency chains over time
>  (e.g. something which logs it per day)
> - a way to see the size of various "targets" over time
>  (e.g. KDE, GNOME, XFCE, minimal)
> - an email when the size changes compared to previous day
>  (e.g. new dependency, or maybe 100MB of documentation in some package)