On Mon, 2012-11-12 at 11:28 -0500, Matthew Miller wrote: > Okay, cool -- there's a lot of enthusiasm for a SIG for the core package > set. > > So, first up on the SIG goals: clarifying our target. > > It's been suggested before that there's so many possibilities that this is > useless, but the point here is to *pick* a reasonable choice as a group and > to work with that (even if we can't get complete consensus). Then, later, > when someone says "but minimal could mean so many differen things!" we > simply say "sure, but *this* is what we mean". > > I see three basic options for the target: > > A) kernel + init system and we're done > B) "boot to yum (with network)": a text-mode bootstrap environment on which > other things can be added by hand (or by kickstart) > C) a traditional Unix command line environment with the expected basic > tools available > > To me, 'C' is too wide for two reasons. First, it's too open for continual > debate, because different people might expect different tools. Second, it's > not necessarily the right base for the rest of the distribution, because > many use cases might not really need that traditional Unix environment. > > I think 'A' is interesting and useful, but I don't think it should be our > target, because it's not *useful enough*. We may want to eventually define a > sub-group which covers just this tiny base (maybe with busybox?), but I > think that's a different project. > > So that leaves me at *mostly B*, although I have some sympathy to the idea > that we should include a few other things like a man page reader, since > we're installing man pages, and a way to deliver e-mail to root, since we're > installing things that send such mail. And I think the core environment > should include ssh, but I'm open to the idea that even that should be an > add-on. If we're targeting "yum" as core functionality, that implies a subset of Python: enough to run yum at least, but probably not much more. This ties into https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=867962 which I'd prefer to solve by introducing a "python-core" package. I've heard complaints from upstream that no-one can know what the "python" package means on any given distribution (everyone splits it out in slightly different ways). Fixing that suggests that the "python" package should become a metapackage that brings in everything built from the python tarball. If we go down this route, say in Fedora 19, then let's introduce a "python-core" or somesuch, and define it loosely to be "whatever yum needs in the minimal environment". Does this sound sane? (especially from the POV of yum developers) What does yum need? Dave -- devel mailing list devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
