[arch-dev-public] Proposal: minimal base system

[Allan McRae]

On 5/2/19 11:38 pm, Bruno Pagani wrote:
> Maybe. As I said in my answer to Bartłomiej, I don’t know if beginners
> know enough things to install what they need beyond the minimum system,
> or if they just read the wiki about doing this or that, which might
> assume they have the current base group installed.

If only the wiki wasn't a static document, and could be updated after
any change was made...

Even then I am fairly sure people wanting to set-up LVM can install the
lvm package.  But I see "competent Linux user" has been removed from the
front page, so maybe we target idiots these days.

>> If we remove the excess from base, then we are down to a very small
>> difference between that and archlinux-system.  Only e2fsprogs, man, and
>> an editor different?
>>
>> So I see the proposed archlinux-system group being essentially what base
>> should be.
> 
> That is because you see base as the minimal system. So I’ll turn this
> differently: do you have objections against having, outside of the
> minimal meta-package described in our proposal, a packages group of
> “relatively standard” tools, that is purposed at beginner wanting to
> have only one simple pacstrap command to issue in order to get started?
> 
> Or put it yet another way: outside of this base group, does our proposal
> of a minimal metapackage suits you? If so, why does it matter to you
> that there is also a base group, provided the name is not subject to
> confusion, that has this metapackage plus other tools (that e.g. people
> coming from random other distro would expect to have at hand from the
> start), knowing that you would likely have almost no interactions with
> this group? If not, then I’m even more importantly waiting for your
> comments.

I don't object to redefining the minimal set of packages we expect
installed and making it a metapackage.  Currently base is bloated, and a
metapackage makes some sense.

archlinux-system - minimal set of packages
base-devel - collection of utilities most people expect installed

So where does that leave base?

base - a smaller collection of utilities most people expect installed

I see redundancy being created.  That is what I object to.

Allan