Hi, Depending on when you last did a clean install its probably already somewhat better, we went through a while back and took a bunch of stuff out of the patterns so in some areas its probably already now better. On 22/06/2019 11:34, Ignacio Taranto wrote:
Before you throw everything at me....
I Love openSUSE, it has one of if not THE the best package management tools available.
But the problem is recommended packages. Y You must be tired of reading about this topic right?
Today I spent the entire afternoon "cleaning-up" my Tumbleweed installation by removing a ton of packages I didn't installed/I don't use.
I get that the default of installing recommended packages is all about user experience, but this has gone to far:
- I had three display Managers installed, THREE! SDDM, LightDM, XDM.
In the latest submission you should be back to getting SDDM or LightDM rather then both on default installs. xdm is still needed as mentioned in the other thread.
- I had a ton unneeded of 32bit libraries/binaries, yes I installed Wine, but I removed several libraries/binaries that weren't needed by Wine. I even had systemd-32bit installed!
If you ever have a 32bit pattern installed it will give you a 32bit version of all the libraries in that pattern that you can.
- I'm currently a ZSH user, but when I first installed Tumbleweed I had at least three shells installed (bash, zsh, tcsh) why?!
I think we improved this as well, there are a bunch of scripts that need bash and it provides /bin/sh from memory tcsh is no longer pulled in.
And that's about things I specifically searched for deletion. I'm sure there's a lot more bloat hiding there.
So, I'm nowhere near expert about packaging or about zypp/libzypp internals. But this is (kind of) what I propose:
- Turn OFF "Recommended Packages" by default
In the past we have had feedback from many people that they like the fact that they have everything they need out of the box especially on desktop systems, obviously that's the opposite of what you want. If we get it to the point of working well potentially we could look at a minimal system role that has recommends disabled
- If after this something is broken by missing packages, then those packages should be Dependencies not Recommendations. - Correct me here if I'm wrong, but patterns don't do anything unless the "Recommended Packages" setting is enabled. So, make the packages you want to be in the patterns as Dependencies not Recommendations.
The patterns will do something with recommends disabled, however the something is known to lead to broken systems particularly on desktops mostly due to certain things being recommended that should be required, once you get out of the core patterns, no recommends and patterns do start to make less sense, for example if you just install the enlightenment package, you'll get a working desktop if you install the pattern with no recommends you should get basically the same thing, if you install it with recommends however, you'll get a browser and some other basic desktop apps, because people complained it didn't have these things..
Again, I'm sure a lot I'm saying here is probably inaccurate. But I'm addressing a real issue here. I'm not surprised outside users form other distros say "openSUSE is bloated".
Recommends Vs Requires can be clear cut and there is some places we get it wrong but there are many other places where its much less clear cut, for example, there are many places where a program might not strictly need a plugin / dependency but without that feature working most users would complain that the program is broken or not useful, in such cases maintainers have probably decided to go with requires over recommends, in other cases they may not have.
In conclusion, this isn't just a childish rant. I really want to openSUSE to improve in this matter. I want to help too, please point me in the right direction.
A start would be firing up a VM then customizing your install to only install the base pattern, then boot in disable recommends, install the rest of the system the way you want then start fixing the stuff that's broken because recommends should be requires. Then I guess start looking at some other desktops / systems you wouldn't normally use and see if you find issues there. Once you know its working adding some openQA tests with no recommends would be great. Really the biggest reason this isn't better in openSUSE atm is because no one who cares about it has put the effort in to make it better, beyond the base system anyway, that has had some work to make it better for containers etc. -- Simon Lees (Simotek) http://simotek.net Emergency Update Team keybase.io/simotek SUSE Linux Adelaide Australia, UTC+10:30 GPG Fingerprint: 5B87 DB9D 88DC F606 E489 CEC5 0922 C246 02F0 014B -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse-factory+owner@opensuse.org