[arch-dev-public] Clean up the base group

[Roman Kyrylych]

On Fri, Feb 26, 2010 at 11:28, Allan McRae <allan at archlinux.org> wrote:
> HI,
>
> I mentioned this several months ago and got no response so I will post
> again.  If there are no objections in 48 hours, the rebuilds will start
> hitting [testing].
>
> FS#12890 suggests cleaning some of the packages from the base group.  The
> goals are to remove old packages that are really no longer needed (e.g.
> cpio) and packages that are only needed as dependencies for other packages
> and would not be installed otherwise (e.g. libfetch).  That will clean up
> the package selection list for the base group in the installer.
>
> Here is the list of what I will do:
> http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/User:Allan/Base_Cleanup
> It splits the packages in the base group into those staying in base; those
> removed from base but staying in [core]; those removed from [core].
>  Packages marked with (???) mean I am not sure what category to put them in.
>  If there are no comments, I will be playing it safe with these.
>
> Any comments before I start?

What is the reason to move kbd out of the base group?
Sure, it will be pulled in since initscripts depend on it,
but so is file, for example, which is really only
needed by mkinitcpio. So where do we draw a line?
(just trying to understand the reasoning here)

My comments, based on the wiki page:

The following packages should not be in the base group,
because they are not 'must have on every system' packages:
* cryptsetup
* device-mapper
* dhcpcd
* jfsutils
* lvm2
* mdadm
* ppp
* reiserfsprogs
* rp-pppoe
* wpa_supplicant
* xfsprogs
they should be selected by the installer automatically,
if it determines that they are required for the setup.

The following packages should not be in the base group,
because they are just a dependencies for other packages
in the base group:
* groff - /usr/bin/man uses it to format pages
* tzdata - required by glibc

The following packages are questionable:
* diffutils - why it should be on every system?
* gawk - why it should be on every system?
* gettext - shouldn't it be required by something?
* mailx
* mlocate - not really needed on every system,
  and I doubt that lots of scripts expect it to be present
  (like grep, for example)
* pciutils - are they used by initscripts or udev?
* pcmciautils - are they used by initscripts or udev?
* perl - required by groff only?
* sysfsutils - required by pcmciautils only?
* texinfo - don't (shouldn't) packages that include info files
  install correctly without texinfo installed?
* usbutils - are they used by initscripts or udev?
* vi - ok, no bikeshed thing here, but there's nano for base

Please note that the above comments are about
the base group, not core repo or the list of packages
that are preinstalled on install disks.

-- 
Roman Kyrylych (Роман Кирилич)