Minimal install (was: Re: Smaller /boot?)

[Rodolfo J. Paiz]

On Wed, 2004-10-13 at 16:16 -0700, Tom Mitchell wrote:
> The right person is "Mr. Bugzilla".
> 

What component? Or have I missed something?

> There are two obvious goals for small but what ever yours are be
> clear.
> 

Check. I was going for "as small as possible but with as little loss of
practicality and usefulness as possible." We did *not* always choose the
smallest possible option: for example, we chose to keep ntp (2MB IIRC)
instead of rdate (10K) due to the vastly-superior functionality and much
more common usage.

> Me I would pick one 'obvious' extra in the current minimum
> and bugzilla it.  The follow the process...
> 

Done that in one or two cases already. Vim-minimal (450KB) depended on
vim-common (10MB!!) due to some documentation; after a bugzilla run the
dependency was removed in FC2 to allow vim-minimal to be installed by
itself.

However, some things are by group. For example, several things are
needed by yum, but deciding to only include up2date in the minimal
install (a reasonable choice IMHO since that is FC's "native" tool)
allowed me to also remove about 10 other packages totalling ~22MB.

Finally, there are some things I wish I could do but that are not binary
"yes/no" package inclusion. There was about 30MB of stuff
in /usr/share/doc in my FC1 minimal install. Simply eliminating those
docs with some sort of "--no-docs" check box in the install would make
the install over 10% smaller.

The group things I can approach via Bugzilla. The docs stuff and such is
harder for me to see how.

Cheers,

-- 
Rodolfo J. Paiz <rpaiz at simpaticus.com>
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