On Thu, Jun 22, 2023 at 10:25:10AM -0500, Chris Adams wrote:
Once upon a time, Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek zbyszek@in.waw.pl said:
I was hoping we would be make the dependency on setup optional. It is a fairly heavyweight package (700+ kb) and with lots of not-that-useful-on-a-typical-modern-installation stuff (mail alias support, csh profile, /etc/hosts, nfs exports, etc.). Most of this is tiny, but it clutters /etc, which ideally would be empty, and also /etc/services is 700 kb.
/etc/services and /etc/protocols are AFAIK mandatory if you want to have network services (either client or server). I don't think there's anything else providing that information.
getservbyname would use /etc/services, but I'm not sure how widely it is used. A lot of code just hardcodes a specific number… Local configuration for port numbers is a concept that only works if somebody synchronizes the file across machines, which is unlikely to happen.
Similarly for /etc/protocols… Code would generally use a define, not resolve the protocol number from a string.
I removed both files on a machine and rebooted and there are no messages or any other indiciation that this makes a difference.
And in particular in the initrd, they are just not neeed.
Zbyszek