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

[Heiko Baums]

Am Fri, 26 Feb 2010 19:28:24 +1000
schrieb Allan McRae <allan at archlinux.org>:

> I mentioned this several months ago and got no response so I will
> post again.  If there are no objections in 48 hours, the rebuilds
> will start hitting [testing].
> 
> FS#12890 suggests cleaning some of the packages from the base group.  
> The goals are to remove old packages that are really no longer needed 
> (e.g. cpio) and packages that are only needed as dependencies for
> other packages and would not be installed otherwise (e.g. libfetch).
> That will clean up the package selection list for the base group in
> the installer.
> 
> Here is the list of what I will do:
> http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/User:Allan/Base_Cleanup
> It splits the packages in the base group into those staying in base; 
> those removed from base but staying in [core]; those removed from 
> [core].  Packages marked with (???) mean I am not sure what category
> to put them in.  If there are no comments, I will be playing it safe
> with these.
> 
> Any comments before I start?

cpio is probably not necessarily needed by the average user, but as far
as I know it's needed to uncompress or read the content of the initrd
(e.g. xzcat kernel26.img | cpio -t), which sometimes can be necessary
for debugging purposes. So I'm not sure if cpio must be kept in the
base group but it should stay in [core].

And cryptsetup definitely needs to stay in [core] and in the base group
because this is needed for encrypting hard disks, which is supported by
AIF anyway. And cryptsetup is needed at boot time and during the
installation from the LiveCDs. This is an essential tool which mustn't
be removed from the base group and from [core].

And I'm not sure if cracklib should be removed from [core]. If it's
moved to [extra] then this may be an option.

Greetings,
Heiko