[arch-dev-public] [RFC] another base cleanup

[Tom Gundersen]

Hi guys,

We have been discussing on IRC on and off that we should cleanup our
base group. I thought I'd make a suggestion, this should clearly be
improved upon, but my main goal is to get the discussion going on the
ML.

It seems to me that the base group has several purposes, so to make
things simpler I suggest splitting it up into several sub-groups, each
with a specific purpose. In the end we might want to merge some/all of
these together, or even drop some of them completely, but I thought
presenting it in this way made the most sense:

We have:

base: things needed by everyone everywhere, including in build chroots
base-boot: needed to boot a standard arch system, but not needed if
all you want is a build chroot
base-network: needed to connect to the internet in order to upgrade
our machine further, but most people probably want to select the tools
they want themselves rather than installing this group. not needed in
a build chroot
base-storage: some of this might be needed to mount your filesystems
at boot, depending on your setup. most people probably want to select
the tools they need, rather than install the whole group. not needed
in a build chroot
base-utils: a sensible set of tools an admin would expect to have at
his/hers disposal after installation, needed to configure the machine
or install further packages. never needed on a machine/chroot where
the admin won't log in to configure it
drop: keep in core (for now, removing it would be a different
discussion), but remove from base. this would be stuff that don't
deserve being in base in its own right (but were pulled in as deps by
others) or stuff that, while generally useful is not needed by
everyone, and those who need it can install it.

My initial suggestion (with some input from people on IRC):

base
===
util-linux
bash
coreutils
man-pages
shadow
glibc
filesystem
gettext
licenses


base-boot
======
initscripts
linux
grub (drop this in favor of syslinux? it would still be in core of course)
syslinux (new)
mkinitcpio (new)


base-network
========
wpa_supplicant
dhcpcd
inetutils
iputils
iproute2 (new)
ppp
pcmciautils (not strictly speaking networking, but might be needed by
some networking devices)


base-storage
========
cryptsetup
device-mapper
e2fsprogs
lvm2
xfsprogs
jfsutigls
reiserfsprogs
mdadm


base-utils
======
vi
wget
which
procps-ng
tar
sed
bzip2
diffutils
file
findutils
gawk
grep
gzip
less
nano
pacman
psmisc


dropped
=====
pciutils (usb pulls in hwids)
usbutils (same as pciutils)
syslog-ng (not necessary on all systems)
sysvinit (pulled in by initscripts, no use on its own)
udev/systemd-tools (alreday gone, pulled in by systemd or initscripts)
man-db (pulled in by man-pages, no use on its own)
perl (not necessary on its own, pulled in by whatever needs it)
cronie (not needed by everyone)
heirloom-mailx (not needed by everyone)
logrotate (not needed by everyone)
gcc-libs (pulled in by whatever needs it, no good on its own)
texinfo (no good on its own, whatever needs it should pull it in)
sysfsutils (no good on its own, whatever needs it should pul it in)




FYI, this is a link to a previous cleanup (sorry if I missed some
other wikipages that I should have linked to):
<https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/User:Allan/Base_Cleanup>.

Cheers,

Tom