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
=============
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