[arch-dev-public] Cleaning up base (FS#12890)

[James Rayner]

On Fri, Sep 25, 2009 at 5:14 PM, Roman Kyrylych
<roman.kyrylych at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Sep 25, 2009 at 09:39, Allan McRae <allan at archlinux.org> wrote:
>> Hi all,
>>
>> FS#12890 (http://bugs.archlinux.org/task/12890) suggests we clean up some
>> crud from the base group.
>> I started a wiki page back in July to look at doing this
>> (http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/User:Allan/Base_Cleanup), which should
>> not be too outdated.  The basic premise in my clean up was
>> 1) remove "useless"/unneeded packages
>> 2) remove packages that are in the base group only because they are
>> dependencies of packages in the base group.
>>
>> An example for #2:  no-one really wants to install libfetch apart from for
>> use by pacman.  Thus libfetch does not need to be part of the base group.
>>
>> That might be slightly controversial...  but I think it makes sense.  When I
>> install, I look through the package lists and select the packages I need.  I
>> do not directly need libfetch but I do select pacman.   Thus pacman is
>> directly part of my base install but libfetch is only indirectly.
>>
>> I need opinions here.  Does this make sense to people?  Have my selections
>> been too strict or not strict enough?
>>
>
> It does make sense.
> I'd go even further and remove cryptsetup, dhcpcd, jfsutils, lvm2, mdadm,
> pcmciautils, ppp, reiserfsprogs, rp-pppoe, xfsprogs, wpa_supplicant
> from base group, but leave them in core, so users or installer
> (for cryptsetup/lvm2/mdadm/*progs can be done automatically) can select them.

That would make [base] the absolute bare minimum to boot the most
trivial system. Is that correct? Or is [base] better to be a minimum
for a basic/functional system?

Pacman says nothing when removing a base package. So base doesn't
really mean anything post-install.  If it means that wireless and
other things become "opt-in" at install time, Thomas is right, the bug
tracker will get crushed with 'no wifi, no dhcp, no editor support'
type bugs. And we don't really gain anything by removing them from the
group. I don't mind if we have a few extras like cryptsetup and dhcpcd
in there.

So I agree with Allan's list mostly. Though if you're keeping
wpa_supplicant there, I'd suggest wireless_tools/iw/crda too. Or
remove it.