Re: My experience with debian
On Tue, 2004-07-13 at 17:50, Christer Solskogen wrote:
> First i must say i love to use FreeBSD. I love it because it has a lot of
> "ports"(or packages), and it has a base-system. A basesystem containing
> gcc, bsdmake, bind, top and such tools, and of course the kernel.
> One of the greatest thing about the base-system is that is it not
> possible to uninstall it. You can delete it my using 'rm' but you cant do
> a pkg_delete base_system, or something. This is a good thing. For FreeBSD.
> Debian, on the other hand, does not have this feature. In Debian you /can/
> (even if it is goddamn stupid!) uninstall everything.
>
> So I have a suggestion. Make a virtualpackage that contains the absolut
> minimum of packages that is needed to get a running Linux system. Make
> those packages absolute impossible to uninstall(but possible to upgrade
> them, or replace them by some other package if wanted, but not uninstall)
I agree with a lot of what you say here and I would like to point out
why it is a great idea and how I achieve a similar thing currently.
Why isn't it a good idea? Because a big part of debian is choice? It's
very
easy to think of situations where you would want to install debian and
not need/want things such as gcc. So why have wait for such a package to
download and then have it take up valueable space on your hard disk
which could be put to good use.
Here's what I do. 1st check out chapter 6.7 of the FAQ for the official
line on priorities.
If I install everything with priority required, important or standard
then I have something very similar to the idea of a *BSD base system.
In fact installing everything in required and important is pretty much
the bare minimum packages you can run debian with; standard gives you
things like: ftp, gcc, make, mutt, procmail, ssh, perl, python, w3m.
Some would argue that that is a fairly large and bloated base; I'm not
qualified to remark on it.
Admittedly I don't use every package in standard but just blindly
installing everything in standard ensures I have a pretty fair base to
build upon without too much crap I don't want. NB: less doesn't even
have priority of required or important.
By the way why wouldn't these packages by included in the above
priorities?
aptitude
sudo
screen
cdrecord
mkisofs
beep
bzip2
eject
wget
discover
I would suggest that they would be installed on a fair majority of
machines and it would be worth considering upgrading their priorities.
Anyway, how to easily install these priorities? In aptitude you can
limit your view to only those packages by typing "l" to bring up the
limiting dialog and entering "~prequired|~pimportant|~pstandard".
Then simply go to the "Not Installed Packages" line and type "+" to
select all those packages to be installed.
Then when I'm installing packages on top of the base I use this
limit: "!~M!~prequired!~pimportant!~pstandard" which only shows
the packages I have explicitly installed above the base.
I would recommend this approach to most people and would greatly
appreciate feedback on it.
Thankyou,
Lex.
Reply to: