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

[Allan McRae]

On 22/1/19 9:41 am, Bruno Pagani wrote:
> Le 22/01/2019 à 00:23, Allan McRae via arch-dev-public a écrit :
>> On 22/1/19 8:03 am, Levente Polyak via arch-dev-public wrote:
>>> Everything that won’t be part of base-system needs to be added as a
>>> dependency to all requiring packages; alternatively don't omit any first
>>> level runtime dependencies at all.
>>>
>>> This package should only depend on strictly required explicit packages
>>> to get a working minimal Arch Linux system.
>>>
>>> The proposed end result is:
>>> - base: convenient helper group for quickly getting a working system
>>>   when installing, must include the new base-system package
>>> - base-system: package defining the minimum dependencies for a working
>>>   base runtime
>> I think the proposal is OK.  I'm not comfortable with our line about
>> base group packages being required given how many of them I don't have
>> installed.
>>
>> However...  I don't like idea of the base group and base-system package
>> existing together.  You definition of what base-system should be is much
>> the same as what the base group was defined to be.  What package
>> justifies itself in the base group, but would not be in base-system?  It
>> seems we would have two very similar things where one would do.
>>
>> Allan
> 
> In the proposal, base would really just be a convenient helper for e.g.
> beginners installing their system, so they could get all tools that are
> often used during install (e.g. cryptsetup, lvm2, various FS/network
> tools, etc.) or (POSIX) tools people coming from other distros would
> expect to be here by default (man pages, nano/vi…) but that are
> interactive ones and thus not really required for operating.
> 
> Anyone knowing their stuff could just install base-system + what they
> actually need (e.g., I would install cryptsetup and vim, and not care
> about netctl, xfsprogs or lvm2).

"Anyone knowing their stuff" is the essentially the stated Arch target
audience.

So, the definitions of the sets of packages are:

base-system - essential packages we assume everyone has installed
(previous definition of base...)

base group - base-system plus other packages some people probably
want/expect and support packages for filesystem types most people don't
actually need.

Maybe slightly facetious on that last one, but I don't see a clear need
for the base group once base-system exists.

Allan