"hard core" linux

[Russell Coker]

On Friday 19 August 2005 00:46, Paul A Houle <ph18 at cornell.edu> wrote:
> >Due to dependencies I don't think it will be possible to spin a
> > distribution without any of the programs which MAY have MP3 support.  You
> > can't produce a distribution with MP3 support and call it Fedora for
> > legal reasons.
>
>     I don't see why I can't pull out any packages I want,  so long as I
> pull out all the dependencies -- this might involve yanking a lot of
> desktop stuff,  but so what.

Sure, if you are prepared to pull out so much desktop stuff then that's a 
possibility.  I was assuming that you wouldn't want to make such radical 
changes.

>     The only trouble I see is that some people might do a "yum install"
> of media-player dependent things which would then install the official
> media players,  which may conflict with locally installed media players.

Surely there's a way of preventing that, I don't know enough about rpm 
dependencies to know how to do it, but it must be possible.

>     I don't have a lot of trouble installing the native mplayer rpm's
> and putting other stuff I want in /usr/local.  For instance,  rpm
> --erase xmms and install xmms from source.  The trouble I run into is
> that there are other things that depend on xmms (that I don't really
> use) and if I rpm --erase --nodeps xmms,  I end up having problems when
> I do yum updates later.

Also if you install tar-balls in /usr/local then you have no way of tracking 
files and versions which may have security implications if there are SUID or 
SGID programs.

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