From: Jesse Keating <jkeating(a)redhat.com>
On 10/09/2012 05:55 AM, John.Florian(a)dart.biz wrote:
>> From: "Jóhann B. Guðmundsson" <johannbg(a)gmail.com>
>
>> I personally want to see the documentation releng/fesco has about
what
>> the default minimal set, what the process is to have
something
>> include,excluded from it and why the packages that exist in it are
there
>
>> in the first place.
>
> I too would very much like to see this as almost all of the (hundreds,
> soon to be thousands of) systems I manage start life as a minimal
install
> and grow "just enough" to fit their role. I take
"minimal" quite
> literally in that I believe it should be the absolute minimum to boot,
> login and install more atop of that, but only as needed. Anything
beyond
> this is some "use case", but minimal is minimal.
>
> --
> John Florian
>
>
>
>
And now we see why Anaconda did /not/ have a "minimal" option for a
while. Minimal means different things.
To some, it means an OS that boots, lets root log in, read man pages,
use non-english languages, and add more packages with depsolving. To
others it means an OS that boots and lets root login, and that's it.
Others feel that minimal should be enough to give you a filesystem and
runtime you can chroot into (but no kernel/bootloader).
I stumbled onto the multiple meanings while writing that message. I had
started to say that minimal should consist of no more than grub, kernel,
bash, login, yum and their deps, then thought to myself, well of course I
want init (systemd) and ... and ...
So maybe I should say that I think Fedora has always had it just about
right, IMHO. A very small, but functional system ready to grow and can do
so with its own tools.
Right now, "minimal" is defined in comps, as a set of
packages.
Installing this group will depsolve and add more of course, which is
controlled by the packages itself. Anaconda will add a few more things
forcefully, such as a kernel and a bootloader and potential arch
specific utilities, as well as authconfig and
system-config-firewall-base in order to add the root user and configure
the firewall.
Makes sense, but can someone please tell me what "comps" stands for? I
mostly know what they're used for, but have never guessed the acronym. My
best guess just came to me after years of pondering: compilations? Anyway,
I feel rather stupid asking this Q, but hey "there's no stupid Qs, right?"
;-)
--
John Florian