Re: Cleanup before install (Re: Purging of unneeded ...)
* Neil Williams:
>
> On Tue, 31 Jul 2007 09:08:10 +0000 (UTC)
> Oleg Verych <for.gmane@flower.upol.cz> wrote:
>> How that can be, without perl? I don't like perl, but it's a must for
>> Debian.
>
> It ain't necessarily so.
> ;-)
>
> Embedded devices don't need perl or ruby or python or ....
Yea, devices don't, software packages do...
> By cross-building the packages for our own repository, we can (and do)
> change the dependency chain to remove things that embedded devices do
> not need, including removing perl from "Essential".
Well, with "pkg perl-base; keep 'really' nothing;" string in config file
you will have empty package installed, but what you say does not solve
problems like this:
- exim4 and cron {1} have dependency on adduser
- adduser is 48k of "unreadable perl mess" and is a wrapper around
useradd from passwd
- it is used only in postinst scripts to create (once) users/groups
needed
So, as you can see, on any system where this packages{1} were installed or
one with /etc/passwd set up by user from its backups or by admin
(after fresh install), this 'adduser' content is useless, while
dependency may stay.
>> Also i don't want to have small or minimal rootfs, i want less bloated
>> one. That means, i have all freedoms to do things i like and OS needs,
>> yet without static info, that is just re-added on every update.
>
> As far as /usr/share/locale is concerned, we have similar needs.
> Embedded devices also don't want 250Mb of LC_MESSAGES files where 90%
> are for unsupported locales.
>
> This was an issue at DebConf7 and one solution is dpkg filtering. This
> allows admins to tell dpkg simply not to install certain files. This
> should be able to replace your script with the benefit that you need
> less temporary space to install the packages themselves.
I did it via wrapping dpkg-deb
- it processes deb file only once, thus saving processing time
- resulting tar is saved temporarily between config/content execution
of the dpkg-deb, but this is small tradeoff one must pay; with tmpfs
it's lightweight; linux-image savings are more than 50M and this
would be transfered via pipe to dpkg's secretary with obviously more
power burned and time consumed.
> I'm not sure if the dpkg maintainers have included this feature yet.
If sh(dash) + sed(GNU)[0] is worse, than C mess in dpkg and obviously
more human-hours needed, then i don't care.
[0] note, debian's not updated busybox's sed currently broken
>> It would be nice if everybody will collect, sort and order things,
>> that are to be needed for laptop Foo/power user/user etc. Publishing
>> such configs will let people have light setups easily.
>
> Use the debian wiki.
I need a feedback from DDs first, because if dpkg solution is being
waited with such hope, then geloiwa is useless.
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