On Mon, Jun 17, 2002 at 11:25:51AM +0200, Magnus Ekdahl wrote: > On Sunday 16 June 2002 22:35, Matt Zimmerman wrote: > > head, tail, tr and wc are certainly necessary for booting. Are those > > the ones which you replaced with asmutils? > > I'm able to boot without head, tail, tr and wc . If you have a spare > filesystem you can trash you could test it yourself. I have put the deb on > http://oxtan.campus.luth.se/debian/ . The package will probably not > install unless you remove all Essential tags, and is still be buggy as > hell. But it is booting at home, and I can install packages.
You are able to boot by replacing these programs with (at least minimally) functionally equivalent versions. They are still necessary. > > There is, of course, nothing stopping a user from deleting those > > programs if they do not use them. > > While they certainly can delete them they would have to be very brave > indeed. Since they cannot possibly know if another program in the distro > depends on the program they delete. The same is true if they want to install something like asmutils-req and recover the extra space. > > As I understand it, booting is not the only requirement for making > > something Essential. Essential packages are treated differently in > > other circumstances as well, for example by dpkg. > > While that may be, I am certainly not getting wiser by this. Are there > some documentation/references, please? dpkg(8) http://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ap-pkg-controlfields.html#s-pkg-f-Essential dpkg will also immediately configure essential packages after they are unpacked, even if multiple packages are being installed in one run. I don't know if this is documented anywhere, but anyone who has used dpkg or apt for any period of time has seen it happen. > > It is also not worthwhile to split packages at the finest possible > > granularity, just to support users who can do without certain components. > > The benefit must justify the additional cost of packaging and maintaining > > the critical programs which coexist with the non-critical ones, and not > > overcomplicating essential infrastructure. > > True, but even for the Zaurus I think the effort is worth while in the long > term. And we must remember that Zaurus is a high end PDA. It would be sad if > we put a lot of work in the Zaurus that would have to be redone for another > PDA. The only Zaurus-specific work that I will be doing involves the kernel and boot process. Everything else is just packaging new software, and helping Debian to fit into a smaller space. > Package: asmutils-req (some assembler, some busybox, some original progs) > Installed-Size: 358k > > Replaces: gzip, e2fsprogs, grep, bsdutils, hostname, shellutils, textutils, > util-linux, fileutils > Installed-Size: 7688k > > the reduction in size is ~95%, and I think 7330k is worth the effort. And > thats only what I can do. I think that the 14 debian essential maintainers > can do a lot better. They have indepth knowledge on their packages and > probably know some additional tweaks. As far as I know, there is no asmutils equivalent for ARM, so that part is unusable for the Zaurus. Also, I am assuming that in calculating Installed-Size, you are including the entire size of the packages, which includes documentation and other things that I will be excluding. -- - mdz -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
