On Sat, May 20, 2006 at 10:09:15AM +0300, Liviu Daia wrote:
> On 19 May 2006, Jacob Meuser <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> > no, I'm not suggesting that xbase be a port; I'm just offering some
> > perspective.
> >
> > as far as "biweekly question", that should be a clue that the people
> > asking the question aren't doing their homework/paying attention (i.e.
> > they probably would not have noticed/cared if xbase had been installed
> > automatically anyway.)
> >
> > as far as making a new install set, that's a lot of continual work for
> > very little gain. not to mention, it and would add more bytes of text
> > to the installation scripts :(
>
> So what you're saying here is that installing 30MB of xbase without
> the user requesting it is acceptable, but making an install script some
> 30 bytes larger isn't, right?
>
> Regards,
>
> Liviu Daia
Under most circumstances, yes. People are far more inconvenienced when
the install floppies cease to work than when something installs 30 MB
of, admittedly, not-too-useful binaries.
And if you really want to be small, you'd better trim the base system
too - Apache and Bind are not necessarily useful, after all.
I'm now setting up a firewall. It's a very old box, and the only
available disk is a Quantum Bigfoot 2.1 GB [1]. I still have some 500 MB
of disk space that does not even have a filesystem on it - and quite a
bit of space on the various filesystems, too.
Of course, if you're installing on CF or somesuch, it *might* be useful
to care about this. Then again, working at the supermarket for a couple
of hours will net you the money to buy a bigger card, quite probably in
less time than it takes to adequately strip baseXY.tgz and xbaseXY.tgz.
Joachim
[1] For those who don't know, this disk is not only old, and small, but
also *very* slow. It was made in large quantities for the home customer
market, where storage capacity count(s/ed) for more than speed.
However, as long as it boots, it's fine for a firewall - it's not as if
it's doing *anything* except running the occasional backup and storing a
select few logs...
