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

[Aaron Griffin]

On Fri, Sep 25, 2009 at 2:14 AM, 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 not be too outdated.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.
>
> In addition: remove tzdata from base, it is pulled by glibc anyway.

I agree with this. As long as these things stay in core, its fine.
base is just a group anyway.

As for the packages Roman suggests, I think we should keep the
wireless/networking utilities in there, as we always claim arch is
intended to be networked.

The filesystem stuff is optional and most users don't need them, so it
seems fine to me... but, here's a question. What happens if I install
a new XFS system, and fsck is forced on the first reboot for some
reason? Isn't xfsprogs required for this? I'm sure it could be
installed simply as an extra installer step, however.