On Wed, Jun 6, 2012 at 11:37 AM, Dan McGee <dpmcgee@gmail.com> wrote:
On Wed, Jun 6, 2012 at 8:33 AM, Andreas Radke <andyrtr@archlinux.org> wrote:
You're leaving the KISS principle here. This won't make things simpler than they are right now for some years.
Please keep our base and base-devel groups how they are. Skilled users are still allowed to disable unwanted packages at install process or any time later.
There's no need to slack down Arch base groups any further. You won't gain much free disc space but handling dependencies would become hell.
As Allan indicated as well as Andy here, I'm definitely worried we are trading minimal space savings for a dependency disaster. Right now the base install "just works", and has all the tools you would expect it to have on a base Linux system while still being as lightweight as any Linux install out there. Moving things out of the "you should have these installed" group would require adding a lot of dependencies for things as simple as utilities used in install scripts, and we will definitely find ourselves in circular dependency hell which is something that should be avoided as much as possible.
I agree.
With this said, I have no problem at all with packages being categorized more- there is no reason iputils can't be in both the 'base' and 'base-network' groups.
If I can expand on this idea, we could keep the current base group as-is (except perhaps without the base packages which are dependencies of other base package), but introduce sub-groups: base-essential (what is called base in the original email) base-boot base-network base-storage base-utils So we keep the current base group but each package in the base group now belongs to a second group. We still assume that the base group is installed so we don't break dependencies and users who don't care a bout a few unused package can still install the base packages with a 'pacman -S base'. However, users with non-regular setups (chroot, VM, etc) can use these new groups to install the base package they need/want, e.g. 'pacman -S base-essential base-utils'. That seem to accomplish what is intended here without risking breakage. As for the dropped list, I would remove the base packages which are dependencies of other base packages and keep the rest in base (and put them in base-utils group). Users can always trim it down as they like. I don't really agree on some package on that drop list like texinfo for example. I can't see all packages with texinfo files adding texinfo as a dependency or optional dependency. Eric
-Dan