On 25 April 2015 at 19:59, Sam Stuewe <halosghost@archlinux.info> wrote:
This may just be my personal opinion, but I have always thought that `base` was supposed to be the absolute bare minimum to have a bootable installation. From that view, it makes sense that a few very small editors made sense in `base` back when Arch wasn't net-install only.
I would say an editor is part of the bare minimum for any system. You can't do much on a system without an editor (of course you can still edit files using some basic tools that don't qualify as editors, but that's besides the point).
Honestly, I think an idea world would put pacman, linux, systemd, bash, a few bootloaders, efi-related utilities and their dependencies in `base` and essentially nothing else.
Multiple bootloaders don't really make sense, and there are many bootloaders to choose from. Choosing one to install by default would probably be a very difficult discussion. It would also mean that users might not even be aware of what bootloader they're using and leave them unprepared when it breaks. Having said that, I think it makes perfect sense to have nano and
vim-minimal on the installation media, but I think of “what is on the installation media” and “what is in `base`” as being two separate things.
They are two separate things already. The installation media comes with wpa_supplicant for one. Kinds regards, Maarten