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

Thu Mar 22 17:29:40 CET 2012

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)
+