So the discussion so far suggests to me that I was wrong; in fact, it would not be easy to maintain any sort of [lite] or [full] that was limited in any way amongst the entire group. We will no longer have a set of packages of any predictable size we can carry around. One point still being missed about base vs. support: right now we are sloppy. We assume that certain packages are installed because they are in base or just because they are important. We should either: a) make our dependencies complete and not rely on such things OR b) have some group of packages that users should assume will break things if they remove. I think a) is better. So I amend my suggestion: [core]: has 2 categories - base, support base is by default fully installed when Arch is installed (base category pkgs also in base group for easy depends) support is by default not installed when Arch is installed only package dependencies require base pkgs to be installed (means we must fix our dependencies) draws from existing base category + drivers/utilities needed for installs minimize size stringent review/discussion for changing base, less so for support [main]: everything else Also, this can be done now because it's relatively easy. - P