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On Tue, Feb 15, 2005 at 02:34:47PM +0000, Joao Clemente wrote:
> 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!"
It strikes me, given the list of things above, that there is perhaps some
misunderstanding: a 'standard' install is not, in fact, the minimum install
you can run a box on. That's "Essential" plus "Required" (if you're into
porting masochism or embedded systems minimalism, it's actually just
"Essential" and understanding what you can't do without some bits of
"Required", even).
"Standard", the default 'select nothing special' install, is exactly that -
a *standard* Debian install. It includes the sorts of tools that most users
would expect to find on a normal, day to day server. It has never been
advertised (by those who know, anyway) as being the thing on which to base
a "tight as you can get" install that is willing to discard functionality
that isn't needed in the context of a dedicated server with only an admin
logging in, and that only for minimal management tasks.
In short, the "nobody missed them" packages had to be installed by hand
on 'most' systems that had users. I know that all of my shell boxes have
a basic GCC on them because, as cool as apt-get install <foo> is, I can't
always guarantee that some trivial utility they want that happens to be
written in C is going to be in Debian (or even, frankly, SHOULD be in
Debian at all).
Folks who are needing to work with exceptional requirements (and let's be
honest, even for non-i386 hardware, some of which I own and develop with, a
500 meg partition is on the small side these days, making it exceptional)
are expected to put in some (fairly minimal) effort to trim the stuff
they don't need in Standard, if they don't want it; that's why there's
"Required" and "Essential" information, to let you know what you cannot,
under any circumstances, safely get rid of and still have an operable
Debian system.
--
Joel Aelwyn <fenton@debian.org> ,''`.
: :' :
`. `'
`-
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