Quoting lsorense@csclub.uwaterloo.ca:
On Mon, Jan 14, 2019 at 07:26:52PM +0100, W. Martin Borgert wrote:We're working on an embedded system, which I'm just upgrading to buster. It eats ~ 180..190 MiB. We dpkg-exclude /usr/share/doc/ and some more, which are not needed there. Also, we use not the official Debian archive with its > 53000 binary packages, but a local mirror with only 450 packages. Otherwise apt collapses once in a while with our 128 MiB RAM. It is still Debian armel, only it's reduced and we add our own dozen of packages. debianforembeddedsystems/rules :—)Yes if you do your own build you can make it smaller.
Well, with our own (re-) build it could be much smaller. E.g. one could leave out many dependencies on libraries and other packages. So far we take Debian "as is", i.e. the original unaltered binary armel packages. We only reduce their number to < 1 %.
Dumping /usr/share/doc, man pages, locale files, and a few other things can save a fair bit of space.
Yes, and it's easy: # echo "path-exclude=/usr/share/doc/*" > /etc/dpkg/dpkg.cfg.d/local-exclude # echo "path-exclude=/usr/share/man/*" >> /etc/dpkg/dpkg.cfg.d/local-exclude etc.
Still not yocto level of shrinking of course or alpine.
Sure. If I had a heavily restricted system, I would look at LEDE a.k.a. OpenWRT.