On Fri, Feb 26, 2010 at 16:03, Allan McRae <allan@archlinux.org> wrote:
On 26/02/10 23:40, Roman Kyrylych wrote:
What is the reason to move kbd out of the base group? Sure, it will be pulled in since initscripts depend on it, but so is file, for example, which is really only needed by mkinitcpio. So where do we draw a line? (just trying to understand the reasoning here)
My reasoning is... I have used "file" before but I have no idea what binaries are in kbd. Very subjective, but that is the best I have. :P
Fair enough. kbd clearly does not belong to the base group from this point of view.
My comments, based on the wiki page:
The following packages should not be in the base group, because they are not 'must have on every system' packages: * cryptsetup * device-mapper * dhcpcd * jfsutils * lvm2 * mdadm * ppp * reiserfsprogs * rp-pppoe * wpa_supplicant * xfsprogs they should be selected by the installer automatically, if it determines that they are required for the setup.
I agree. But that is for the future when the installer is that smart. I will file and installer bug report requesting this.
The following packages should not be in the base group, because they are just a dependencies for other packages in the base group: * groff - /usr/bin/man uses it to format pages * tzdata - required by glibc
Seems fine to me.
The following packages are questionable: * diffutils - why it should be on every system?
base=devel maybe?
Yep, seems like it. At least initscripts/udev/mkinitcpio don't use it. The only valid use that can keep it in base (from my point of view) is diff -u file file.pacnew
Thanks for the comments. I should add that "base" means almost nothing to me as I only use it for build chroots. My main installs start off with only kernel26, initscripts, e2fsprogs, coreutils and pacman (or something like that).
To me base group means the absolute minimum of packages that must be on 99% of systems and don't include packages that are dependencies only, so that pacman -Qe shows nice list. All other things can be in Core but not in the base group. (BTW, I think the list of packages in Core is well reasoned) -- Roman Kyrylych (Роман Кирилич)