On Mon, Nov 13, 2017 at 01:14:01AM +0100, Guillem Jover wrote:
> I think that trying to trim down the pseudo-Essential set is an
> extremely worthwhile goal, because it has visible effects on several
> areas, at least:
>
> - Possibly making bootstrapping a port way easier.
> - Making it possible and easier to use Debian on (very) embedded systems.
> - Reducing footprint for minbase setups, such as VM images, buildds,
> chroots, and similar.
Except for a port, you will need *some* file system, so simply
removing all file system utilities from the minbase set doesn't
necessarily make it *easier* per se.
And most minbase setups aren't necessarily manually removing locale
files today, because debootstrap doesn't support this. I'm just
pointing out that *just* simply splitting out coreutils into coreutils
and coreutils-l10n will shrink the minbase set by roughly as much as
what is listed at the EssentialOnDiet page.
This is not an argument to not do the other things on the
EssentialOnDiet page. I'm just pointing out there's quite a lot of
low-hanging fruit that can also be harvested if the priamry goal is
reduction of minbase for VM images, chroots, buildds, etc. And I
don't think it should be neglected.
I will certainly grant that if the goal is to make Debian work on
super-tiny embedded systems we will need to eject a lot of things from
minbase, including bash, tar, perl-base, etc. And if the super-tiny
embedded system is going to use squashfs, and is not any other on-disk
file system, then sure, that's certainly a case where removing
e2fsprogs makes sense.
But there are *plenty* of use cases where people are using a minbase
created using debootstrap where there is some lower-hanging fruit that
we might want to pick first.
Cheers,
- Ted
