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

[Roman Kyrylych]

On Fri, Feb 26, 2010 at 16:03, Allan McRae <allan at archlinux.org> wrote:
> On 26/02/10 23:40, Roman Kyrylych wrote:
>> 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 reasoning is...   I have used "file" before but I have no idea what
> binaries are in kbd.  Very subjective, but that is the best I have. :P

Fair enough. kbd clearly does not belong to the base group
from this point of view.

>
>
>> 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.
>
> I agree.  But that is for the future when the installer is that smart. I
> will file and installer bug report requesting this.
>
>
>> 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
>
> Seems fine to me.
>
>
>> The following packages are questionable:
>> * diffutils - why it should be on every system?
>
> base=devel maybe?

Yep, seems like it.
At least initscripts/udev/mkinitcpio don't use it.
The only valid use that can keep it in base
(from my point of view) is diff -u file file.pacnew

> Thanks for the comments.  I should add that "base" means almost nothing to
> me as I only use it for build chroots.  My main installs start off with only
> kernel26, initscripts, e2fsprogs, coreutils and pacman (or something like
> that).

To me base group means the absolute minimum of packages
that must be on 99% of systems and don't include packages
that are dependencies only, so that pacman -Qe shows nice list.
All other things can be in Core but not in the base group.
(BTW, I think the list of packages in Core is well reasoned)

-- 
Roman Kyrylych (Роман Кирилич)