[arch-general] `base` group replaced by mandatory `base` package - manual intervention required

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Fri, 11 Oct 2019 10:26:19 +0100, Ralph Corderoy wrote:
>Hi Eli,
>
>> Off the top of my head:
>>
>> vi
>> vim  
>...
>
>I was curious.  Others might be interested in the result.
>
>    $ expac -S '%m %n' vi vim neovim vis ed emacs acme gedit pluma xed
> \
>    >    geany leafpad kate nano vscode atom |
>    > sort -n  
>    106496 ed
>    300032 vi
>    317440 leafpad
>    1076224 vis
>    2584576 nano
>    3707904 vim
>    12306432 xed
>    13692928 geany
>    15044608 gedit
>    20497408 neovim
>    21733376 kate
>    31233024 pluma
>    133710848 emacs
>    238760960 atom
>    $
>

An editor is a fundamental tool, so the install size most of the times
is more or less irrelevant. For an editor way more important are
features and/or easiness of usage. However, the real install size for
example a GUI editor, such as e.g. "leafpad", for sure is way larger
than that of vim, let alone that it is rendered useless, if only command
line is available.

$ pacman -Si leafpad gtk2 vim | grep -eName -e Depends
Name            : leafpad
Depends On      : gtk2
Name            : gtk2
Depends On      : atk  pango  libxcursor  libxinerama  libxrandr  libxi  libxcomposite  libxdamage  shared-mime-info  cairo  libcups  gtk-update-icon-cache  librsvg  desktop-file-utils
Name            : vim
Depends On      : vim-runtime=8.1.2102-1  gpm  acl  glibc  libgcrypt  pcre  zlib  libffi

If the target should be a small sized install, then even the current
base package might not be the best starting point ;) [1].

Regards,
Ralf

[1]
$ pacman -Qi busybox | grep -eDepends -eSize
Depends On      : None
Installed Size  : 1440.00 KiB

"BusyBox combines tiny versions of many common UNIX utilities into a
single small executable. It provides replacements for most of the
utilities you usually find in GNU fileutils, shellutils, etc." -
https://www.busybox.net/about.html