Minimal installation

[Enrico Scholz]

fedora-devel at camperquake.de (Ralf Ertzinger) writes:

>> to have a really minimal installation option? I was thinking something 
>> like the base installation of the BSDs.
>
> I think this depends on what you define as minimal.

The programs covered by the Posix Shell and Utilities (XCU) specification[1]
plus a few base-utilities like rpm.

Unfortunately, the related packages have lots of Requires: so that
e.g. a minimal system for FC2 consists of 53 packages with <100 MB
(afair). I do not know the numbers for FC3 but the situation becomes
worse there since the huge kernel package gets added to the minimal
system (in FC2, the kernel was not part of the minimal package set).

But there are other packaging errors which bloat the system. E.g. when you
install 'gnupg' (required by apt or yum), you have to install perl + openldap
(around 50 of unneeded and additional MB). A simple solution would be the
splitting of the 'gnupg' package into a core- and an extra-subpackage, but
nobody cares about it.


> A kernel

Yes, the kernel is one of the worst packages in fedora; the headers (20-30
MB of wasted place + 6000 inodes) do not belong in a base package. I hope
that this disastrous error will be fixed in FC4.




Enrico

Footnotes: 
[1]  http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/utilities/contents.html