[Fedora-livecd-list] Starting point

[Glen Eustace]

On Wed, 2005-08-17 at 15:08 +0530, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
> >At present, the minimal install of FC4 still installs way too many
> >things for what I wanted. There are dependencies on packages that I'll
> >never need or use and it is proving difficult to cut it back.
> >  
> >
> Not related to the Live CD but would you mind filing bugs against the 
> appropriate packages. Additional functionality can be split up into sub 
> packages. This is being considered for dovecot for example

It would seem that many packagers are assuming that their package will
be installed on a full distribution, these dependencies seem to cause
unnecessary bloat. Rather than trying to make packages as independent as
possible, I am seeing a steadily growing proliferation of the spiders
web.

I can't give you a specific, but the sort of thing I am getting at is
the use of perl and python scripts that are only used during the
configuration of a package. In normal use the package doesn't need perl
or python but if you want to install the package, you wind up having to
include these packages as well (and they aren't small). While it may not
be the case everytime, a bash script may have done the job quite nicely.

It seems that as time has gone by, we are seeing more rather than less
dependence with packages. I remember being able to do a minimal install
of some of the earlier RH releases and they wer something like 126Mb
compared with a minimal of FC4 which is more than 500Mb !! The base
packages themselves haven't grown that much, but the dependencies sure
have.

Glen.