Call for a real Minimal install, remove the bloat!

[Hans Eric Sandström]

These are the packages I removed after doing a minimal install:

# rpm -e apmd aspell aspell-en attr autofs comps dump gnupg hotplug
isdn4k-utils jfsutils kudzu lftp libwvstreams lrzsz minicom nano parted
pcmcia-cs rdate system-config-mouse system-config-network-tui setserial
sendmail specspo star statserial up2date usbutils wireless-tools wget wvdial
yp-tools ypbind yum irda-utils

I could argue for keeping yum/up2date but I really would like to have apt-rpm
instead. One of the package managers (up2date/you or apt-get) is needed to
make it easy to add/update packages later.

I've been a RedHat user since RedHat 4 or something and vith every new version
more bloat gets added. I remember the days when one could install SLS from a
couple of diskettes. Lets try to break this trend with Fedora.

Here are my suggestions:

1. Create a real Minimal Install option in the Text Based Installation.
2. Remove the above packages and probably a bunch more. A minimal install
should be..., right minimal!
3. Break out /usr/share/doc from the packages and make xxx-docs packages of
them.

Take a look in /usr/share doc:
# du -s * | sort -nr | head -4
4184    bash-2.05b
2752    pam-0.77
2560    gawk-3.1.3
1496    glibc-common-2.3.3

Just having a bash-docs package saves 4Mb from a minimal install. Another
option would be to install with rpm --excludedocs if minimal install is
choosen. But I think I want to keep the man pages hmmm...

There are probably lots of other things to do, but we need to start somewhere.

Hans Eric Sandström, MailCore AB