On Tue, 09.10.12 01:00, Miloslav Trmač (mitr(a)volny.cz) wrote:
> is any current data
> available about how our minimal footprint got worse/better over time in
> both terms of packages and disk space, and which packages are to blame
> for it?
>
> If the libmicrohttpd dep really is problematic I am happy to split it
> off, but I'd really like some hard data first whether doing this would
> help more than a trivial bit to achieve a smaller minimal installation
> set.
One more network-listening service, let alone an unauthenticated one,
is way "more than a trivial bit" IMHO.
The disk space aspect is by far the most negligible of the four
reasons for a minimal installation I have mentioned earlier today.
(The cost of a megabyte of storage is practically indistinguishable
from zero, and even multiplied by the number of Fedora users it is not
a number that would inspire much work.) If you are curious about
specific data, I don't have it available; I'll ask around.
Well, I actually believe the disk space matters, since copying 1000
container images around with each costing 50M is quite a difference from
each costing 500M.
I wrote this little script now to generate a minimal container installation:
http://0pointer.de/public/miss.sh.txt
This will simply install SSH, systemd, passwd, and rpm into some
directory. This is enough to boot cleanly into it via "systemd-nspawn -b
-D <somedirectory>", and then log in and shut down the container
again. Note that this is much more minimal than what Fedora considers
the basic set. i.e. no kernel (not needed for a container), no syslog
(yay for the journal!) and lacking a few other things.
Here's the data I gathered of the previous releases:
http://0pointer.de/public/miss/
The number of packages this pulls in:
Fedora 15: 131
Fedora 16: 134
Fedora 17: 120
Fedora 18: 106
We got much better here! Great work by everybody involved!
The disk space this takes up on disk:
Fedora 15: 591M
Fedora 16: 617M
Fedora 17: 442M
Fedora 18: 434M
Which is pretty OK, too, I guess.
To build such an image I'd really would have preferred not installing
the docs. It appears rpm once had a feature for that where you could add
excludedocs in rpmrc. This feature seems to have been removed. Why? Can
we get that back? Or can I enable this for yum in some other way? Anyone
has an idea?
From the list of packages this minimal set still installs, that
I'd
really like to see gone:
chkconfig
gamin
info
systemd-sysv
But otherwise there's very little to really complain about I must
admit. Heads off to everybody involved in reducing the minimal
installatation set size. And sorry for assuming this initiative was dead.
Lennart
--
Lennart Poettering - Red Hat, Inc.