On 26/02/10 23:40, Roman Kyrylych wrote:
On Fri, Feb 26, 2010 at 11:28, Allan McRae<[email protected]> wrote:
HI,
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?
What is the reason to move kbd out of the base group?
Sure, it will be pulled in since initscripts depend on it,
but so is file, for example, which is really only
needed by mkinitcpio. So where do we draw a line?
(just trying to understand the reasoning here)
My reasoning is... I have used "file" before but I have no idea what
binaries are in kbd. Very subjective, but that is the best I have. :P
My comments, based on the wiki page:
The following packages should not be in the base group,
because they are not 'must have on every system' packages:
* cryptsetup
* device-mapper
* dhcpcd
* jfsutils
* lvm2
* mdadm
* ppp
* reiserfsprogs
* rp-pppoe
* wpa_supplicant
* xfsprogs
they should be selected by the installer automatically,
if it determines that they are required for the setup.
I agree. But that is for the future when the installer is that smart.
I will file and installer bug report requesting this.
The following packages should not be in the base group,
because they are just a dependencies for other packages
in the base group:
* groff - /usr/bin/man uses it to format pages
* tzdata - required by glibc
Seems fine to me.
The following packages are questionable:
* diffutils - why it should be on every system?
base=devel maybe?
* gawk - why it should be on every system?
* gettext - shouldn't it be required by something?
* mailx
Don't we keep that around for some standards reason.
* mlocate - not really needed on every system,
and I doubt that lots of scripts expect it to be present
(like grep, for example)
fine.
* pciutils - are they used by initscripts or udev?
* pcmciautils - are they used by initscripts or udev?
No idea here...
* perl - required by groff only?
This package I thought should not be installed as a dependency, which it
would be if groff pulled it.
* sysfsutils - required by pcmciautils only?
Fine.
* texinfo - don't (shouldn't) packages that include info files
install correctly without texinfo installed?
They should. But is "info" a command we want in the base group. I lean
towards yes.
* usbutils - are they used by initscripts or udev?
* vi - ok, no bikeshed thing here, but there's nano for base
Please note that the above comments are about
the base group, not core repo or the list of packages
that are preinstalled on install disks.
Thanks for the comments. I should add that "base" means almost nothing
to me as I only use it for build chroots. My main installs start off
with only kernel26, initscripts, e2fsprogs, coreutils and pacman (or
something like that).
Allan
