On Wed, Jun 6, 2012 at 11:37 AM, Dan McGee <[email protected]> wrote: > On Wed, Jun 6, 2012 at 8:33 AM, Andreas Radke <[email protected]> wrote: >> You're leaving the KISS principle here. This won't make things simpler >> than they are right now for some years. >> >> Please keep our base and base-devel groups how they are. Skilled users >> are still allowed to disable unwanted packages at install process or >> any time later. >> >> There's no need to slack down Arch base groups any further. You won't >> gain much free disc space but handling dependencies would become hell. > > As Allan indicated as well as Andy here, I'm definitely worried we are > trading minimal space savings for a dependency disaster. Right now the > base install "just works", and has all the tools you would expect it > to have on a base Linux system while still being as lightweight as any > Linux install out there. Moving things out of the "you should have > these installed" group would require adding a lot of dependencies for > things as simple as utilities used in install scripts, and we will > definitely find ourselves in circular dependency hell which is > something that should be avoided as much as possible.
I agree. > > With this said, I have no problem at all with packages being > categorized more- there is no reason iputils can't be in both the > 'base' and 'base-network' groups. If I can expand on this idea, we could keep the current base group as-is (except perhaps without the base packages which are dependencies of other base package), but introduce sub-groups: base-essential (what is called base in the original email) base-boot base-network base-storage base-utils So we keep the current base group but each package in the base group now belongs to a second group. We still assume that the base group is installed so we don't break dependencies and users who don't care a bout a few unused package can still install the base packages with a 'pacman -S base'. However, users with non-regular setups (chroot, VM, etc) can use these new groups to install the base package they need/want, e.g. 'pacman -S base-essential base-utils'. That seem to accomplish what is intended here without risking breakage. As for the dropped list, I would remove the base packages which are dependencies of other base packages and keep the rest in base (and put them in base-utils group). Users can always trim it down as they like. I don't really agree on some package on that drop list like texinfo for example. I can't see all packages with texinfo files adding texinfo as a dependency or optional dependency. Eric > > -Dan
