Re: why is sarge "minimal" intall so huge compared to woody?
Joel Aelwyn wrote:
On Sat, Feb 12, 2005 at 03:46:04PM +0000, Joao Clemente wrote:
[snip]
I'm not saying sarge is not usefull. I'm just saying that, in this
particular scenario, it is wasting lots of space for doing the same
thing that woody does requiring a lot less disk space.
And ok, one must admit that recent hardware does not have disk space
problems, but maybe I'm still an "old time" admin, I like my server
installs as compact as possible..
Joao Clemente
If you really believe that it is doing "the same stuff" that Woody did,
then you are certainly welcome to keep Woody installed and not upgrade.
My first Linux system ran on < 100 megs, total, and got downloaded on
floppies. I believe that system is, in fact, still available somewhere for
folks to download and install.
However. If you believe that something in that 3x larger installation
serves no purpose and should be removed, in the name of saving space, I
invite you to specify what it is, how much space it will save, and what the
consequences will be for removing it from 'standard'. Given the amount of
effort I have seen being put into trying to keep the standard install size
*down*, I think it's only fair to expect people who want it to go smaller
to offer their suggestions for how to accomplish that.
Joe, I hope that by rereading my previous statement and what I'm gonna
try to explain you can see my point. Once again, I'm not trying to start
a flame war. And, if you find a previous reply I had given in this
thread, I even made a "funny" comment that explains what I felt:
It seems (someone said this earlier) that woody had a bug wich "allowed"
us to not install some packages that should have been installed. This
bug allows me to have, for instance, an apache server + dhcp server and
a iptables firewall in my little installation machine. How to I
acomplish this? By doing what I defined as a "minimal install" in my
1rst e-mail, then apt-get'ting samba, apache and dhcpd. Thats it.
If I follow the same procedure in sarge, I'll end up with much more disk
space used, as more packages are installed. Packages which were not
installed in woody because of that certain bug that Joey (joeyh [at]
debian.org) described earlier. However, *in this particular scenario*,
it seem that those packages were never missed by anyone. They were
simply not needed, at least it seems that way...
Listen, I'm not fighting about "foo is a webserver, foo 0.2 is smaller
than foo 0.3, therefore is better". I'm fighting (well, I'm not
fighting, its just a way of speach) over "I want foo. I used to be able
to have foo by its own. Now to have foo I need to have xyz and foobar,
things that I didn't needed, and that foo does not miss"
You see, even if I have all the disk/memory space in the world, having
xyz and foobar (that I dont need) is having 2 more packages to worry
about updates (security or whatever), for instance.
I'm just now booting the machines I installed to make a package
comparison to try to answer your questions....
Ok, I'm looking at the diff...
For instance, why do I need (in a server) of (forcefully) having
development tools installed? (I remember assisting a conference about
security - ok, they are paranoid - where they showed that by having a
compiler one could compile code to mess something up later)
Examples are:
bison
cpp, cpp-3.3
flex
g++, g++-3.3
gcc. gcc-3.3, gcc-3.3-base
gdb
And, for instance, do I need dictionaries?
iamerican
ienglish
ispell
Look Joel, I used the term "fighting" above but I am not arguing or
wanting, or demanding anything. I just started this thread trying to
understand why my "minimal" sarge installs were so bigger than my
"minimal" woody installs.
Now, trying to answer to this that you've said:
> Given the amount of effort I have seen being put
> into trying to keep the standard install size
> *down*, I think it's only fair to expect people
> who want it to go smaller to offer their suggestions
> for how to accomplish that.
I think that we've been talking about some ideas here ("perfect"
solutions don't just pop out without sharing points-of-view).
As a suggestion, I would point 2 possibilities
- "maybe" the "development machine" profile could be taken out from the
"standart" install... OR ... a "minimal/bare server/whatever" profile
could be given as alternative, something that would describe itself as
"without this your machine would not boot. You will definitible need to
apt-get something to have something usefull" (I'm being extreme here,
just to pass the idea
- "maybe", as we had discussed here, packages could be splitted so that
one had the choice to install "the binary" and optionally "the
documentation". I saw people saying they erase /usr/share/doc or
whatever as they dont need it in a server environment.
Joel, I believe these suggestion are not trivial, and may not even be
usefull, and if usefull maybe in some few particular scenarioes. I like
debian, I use it as it is, I use both sarge and woody. I even benefit
from sarge having the devel packages installed as I already needed to
compile stuff for my machines and had everything there! I would be glad
if I could help to improve it, and I believe these "toughts" may (or
not) trigger someone "in charge" to say "hey, why didn't we tought of
that, let's do it!"
Just toughts...
Joao Clemente
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