On 10/25/2011 3:05 PM, Ruediger Meier wrote:
On Tuesday 25 October 2011, Stefan Seyfried wrote:
On 25.10.2011 17:15, Ruediger Meier wrote:
Like I've mentioned in my other emails in this thread I would not waste too much time about minimizing the package selection.
You don't have to. Nobody forces you to maintain a pattern, but let's not stop the ones who are wanting to do this.
Don't get me wrong I also vote for small installations. But what's the point of removing such fundamental things like acl just to safe 190K for example happened in 11.4.
Of course we are imaging those VMs and not installing from DVD. Still, having a minimal selection is useful because adding packages that are needed is IMHO easier than removing everything that's unneeded. Somehow those "gold images" have to be created ;-)
Really? I think sometimes it's the other way around. If I know that I don't need zsh than it's easy to remove. If my login shell is zsh since years but suddenly it's not installed anymore then I can't even login to install it (happened in 11.4).
No that's backwards. It's easier, simpler, cleaner, more transparent to add than to remove. This is not my or anyone's opinion. It's a demonstrable simple fact. In this particular case of a package selection in a linux distro, a few examples, When you start with a lot of things, it's up to you to look through it all and figure out what you don't need. That is unreasonable work and error-prone. When a package gets added, it sometimes pulls dependencies with it. When you remove that same package, those dependencies are not usually also removed automatically. On my headless, no X servers, I usually need Image Magick and ghostscript for image manipulation for faxes and scanned documents. If those packages aren't very carefully compiled to exclude their X11 features and their X lib requirements, they will end up pulling in a bunch of X stuff. If I then remove ghostscript and ImageMagick, or replace them by zypper dup with ones from my own repo, none of those X packages are removed unless I know to go remove them. This is amplified countless times by countless interconnections. It is absolutely unreasonable to expect the user to be able to analyze all of those interactions. That would require essentially all of the knowledge and skill required to _build_ the entire distro from scratch. Even if you _have_ that, it's the furthest thing from convenient, and worse, is poor procedural design. Just because you can do a complex thing does not mean it's equally error-prone or error-free to _require_ doing something complex every time, vs carefully figuring it out once and making it into a reusable system, and then only having to hone it after that, not reinvent it at every install. On other distros, things like "apt-get autoremove" attempt to help with this but that is not possible to be 100% reliable or complete, and it isn't. It's merely better than nothing. It's really basic theory and isn't up for debate whether you think it or not. It is more robust and simpler to add complexity than to remove from it, from anything. The clean, reliable, efficient, serves-the-most, way is start with the minimum, and add what you want. -- bkw -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse-factory+owner@opensuse.org