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

[Dan McGee]

On Wed, Jun 6, 2012 at 8:33 AM, Andreas Radke <andyrtr at archlinux.org> wrote:
> You're leaving the KISS principle here. This won't make things simpler
> than they are right now for some years.
>
> Please keep our base and base-devel groups how they are. Skilled users
> are still allowed to disable unwanted packages at install process or
> any time later.
>
> There's no need to slack down Arch base groups any further. You won't
> gain much free disc space but handling dependencies would become hell.

As Allan indicated as well as Andy here, I'm definitely worried we are
trading minimal space savings for a dependency disaster. Right now the
base install "just works", and has all the tools you would expect it
to have on a base Linux system while still being as lightweight as any
Linux install out there. Moving things out of the "you should have
these installed" group would require adding a lot of dependencies for
things as simple as utilities used in install scripts, and we will
definitely find ourselves in circular dependency hell which is
something that should be avoided as much as possible.

With this said, I have no problem at all with packages being
categorized more- there is no reason iputils can't be in both the
'base' and 'base-network' groups.

-Dan