[Mageia-dev] base system size for next beta1

Fri Mar 18 08:35:29 CET 2011

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
+>
+