On 10/08/2019 01:33 PM, Eli Schwartz via arch-general wrote:
Because this is not about containers. There are tons of things in the old base group which I don't want installed on my heavyweight X11 desktop which is used for media consumption.
I don't need netct (because networkmanager is love), s-nail (unuseful in practice) or vi (symlink to vim) as a baseline fact.
I don't need cryptsetup or device-mapper if I'm not opting into an encrypted filesystem, but this does not matter as I cannot get rid of either one due to systemd performing shared library links to libcryptsetup.so and therefore also having a depends+=('cryptsetup')
I do not need mdadm or lvm2, because I don't use RAID or lvm, so why do you think my system is unusable without it? Note: in practice, both are required by libblockdev, which means if you use udisks2 you have both installed anyway.
As long at it passes the Allan test, then so be it. I do use mdadm, netctl, s-nail (mailx) but agree with vim as baseline. The point being no kernel? So now a 'base' install does not result in a running system? It seems like forcing the install of `base` + (a list of other packages) just to result in a bootable system will create more problems then it solves. At least a meta of 'base-legacy' would provide the same install capability. As for the argument advances that this was due to those looking for a container install, why not create a 'base-container' or 'base-minimal' and leave the traditional 'base' alone? -- David C. Rankin, J.D.,P.E.