On Fri, 6 Aug 2010 10:04:59 +0200 Carsten Hey <carsten@debian.org> wrote: > * Provide debconf-english and install it by default. That's not very friendly to non-english speakers but it would be supportable if you chose to modify the multistrap config to specify debconf-english explicitly. I'll add debconf-english to the repository. > useless dependencies saves 135kB disk space (or 94.2kB if you Not much, overall. > * Disable apt's cache. Use --tidy-apt to remove these files at the initial multistrap stage and in the final tarball. The first 'apt-get update' will put them back. > The size of /var/cache/apt/pkgcache.bin and srcpkgcache.bin is more > than one MB with only Grip/Lenny in the sources.list and even more > with additional entries. The advantage of keeping this cache would > be a faster startup of apt. No, it's more than that - it is the ability to query the apt cache whilst offline. As a default, 1Mb is a fair price. (If 1Mb makes a difference to your Grip system, you should be looking at Baked.) > A file /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/99nocache-emdebian with the content > 'Dir "/" { Cache "var/cache/apt/" { srcpkgcache ""; pkgcache ""; } }' > is sufficient to disable this cache. Since apt can't remove Supportable via the config script which can be specified in the multistrap config. This is not suitable as a default option. > * Don't install man-db and groff-base by default. That breaks binary-compatibility with Debian because you will be unable to install packages from Debian without using apt-grip. This cannot be supported as a default. There isn't a way to exclude certain packages which are Priority: required, mainly because this would require being able to chroot into the filesystem, run apt-get --purge remove; apt-get --purge autoremove. You can specify omitrequired in the multistrap config but then you would need to include all Priority: required packages *except* the ones you want and their dependencies. This is implicit in the way Debian works - it is another price of binary compatibility. > * Don't install orphaned libraries. > > I found eight orphaned libraries: libsysfs2, liblzo2-2, libsasl2-2, > libgnutls26, libpcre3, libgcrypt11, libtasn1-3 and libgpg-error0. > Purging these packages saved 1987kB disk space. Orphaned libraries can only be detected after the installation but I'll take a look at those specific cases and see if there is a reason why these are being included. > Providing deborphan and/or debfoster (one depends only on libc6, the > other additionally depends on libgc1c2) in the archive would make it > easier for users to find such orphaned libraries. I can add deborphan to Grip. > After running apt-get clean && apt-get update in the newly created > Grip/Lenny chroot "du -sbx /" printed 66524376, after these simple > optimizations it printed 60655071. Of course it would be easy to > further reduce the size of the chroot, but the most obvious ways are > removing packages that are usable without installing additional ones. > > One could argue that the package selection is way better when multistrap > is used instead of debootstrap (I don't know if it is, but I guess so); Not by default, no. A vanilla Lenny is a vanilla Lenny - for compatibility reasons. The package selection should be the same *except* that we turn off Recommends. > I think that it should be as easy as possible for people to do their > first steps in emdebian and to accomplish impressive results That is why man-db needs to be retained and why debconf-i18n should also be retained - we cannot assume that new people have English as their first language. -- Neil Williams ============= http://www.data-freedom.org/ http://www.nosoftwarepatents.com/ http://www.linux.codehelp.co.uk/
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