On Mon, 2004-11-01 at 11:31 -0600, Satish Balay wrote:
> Well - you want to remove all x/gui packages anyway - and most (if not
> all) synaptic dependent packages (including up2date) are gui packages
> anyway - hence should be removed (according to your minimal spec)
>
Up2date is not a GUI package. It is a text-mode tool. There is also
up2date-gnome for those who additionally want a GUI tool, and rhn-applet
to let them know in GNOME of needed updates. But up2date itself is text-
based and has been key to keeping all my boxes properly patched.
> And I didn't think loosing up2date was a big deal - as yum would
> suffice in your minimal install.
>
Losing up2date and keeping yum would be a viable alternative, but it is
not my preferred method of operation. As I am trying to "give back" a
little to the Fedora community and Red Hat, Inc. where I can, I prefer
to use "native" tools where possible. Up2date is a clear example since
it is the "native" tool for Fedora even though yum is also fully-
supported, and up2date is also the package manager for RHEL.
So I prefer to use up2date, even if it has a small space penalty. If the
difference is too large, then I'll settle for yum... but it is not my
preferred option.
> There is always a tradeoff on pushing synaptics into 'rhpl' - now
> multiple tools that might depend-on/configure synaptics can now use
> some common code from 'rhpl'.
>
> Perhaps you could argue that rhpl should be split up into
> rhpl/rhpl-gui (not sure if this is feasiable or justified)
>
I don't understand the ramifications of those above, honestly... all I
know is that synaptics didn't exist before, and it's instantly become a
major roadblock to me. Happy to see it there for whomever has that type
of hardware, but hate to see it intertwined in dependency hell.
I would understand synaptics requiring rhpl to be present. After all,
"the rhpl package contains Python code used by programs in Red Hat
Linux" is what "rpm -qi rhpl" says. What I cannot understand is that
rhpl *requires* synaptics. That seems backwards.
> Could you list which packgaes you'd like to see gone (and are unable
> to remove) - which would add up to the 40M of savings? Synaptics by
> itself is 40k - so thats not it.<I'd like to see your listing from
> 'yum remove'>
Well, the 40MB was an estimate and it turned out to be high. But here we
go, I'll attempt to be as specific as possible. First let's try to
eliminate freetype and fontconfig, and we find that xorg-x11-libs
requires freetype and fontconfig. We try to remove xorg-x11-libs, which
is required by xorg-x11-Mesa-libGL, and we try to remove that which is
required by synaptics. Finally we try to remove synaptics and we get
required by rhpl which is required by up2date.
Now, let's keep in mind that the "Size" reported by "rpm -qi" is
misleading. For example, cups and cups-libs reported less than 600KB
overall but removing them reduced disk space used by 6,068KB. Still,
using this parameter we get:
fontconfig 244,563
freetype 2,433,842
xorg-x11-libs 6,260,002
xorg-x11-Mesa-libGL 474,388
synaptics 94,970
rhpl 1,109,176
up2date 4,442,185
============
TOTAL: 15,059,126 (14,706KB)
Since, after all, this is a test system, I'm actually going to go
through with this. Removing all these packages together results in a
disk reduction of 16,888KB which is roughly 15% greater than expected
by the Size parameter.
Of course, having done this and wiped up2date, then I can also remove a
whole lot of other stuff which is kind of controversial. Sacrificing yum
allows me to delete another 31,564KB of stuff, sacrificing passwd
(dependencies again) allows me to delete another 10,944KB worth of
sendmail, openldap, etc., and so on.
So there clearly *is* a problem here from my point of view. Note that
just the rhpl dependency on synaptics forced me to lose up2date in order
to remove another 10MB of stuff, and that in order to delete openldap I
was forced to delete passwd! See my test doc (at the end) for details on
my current progress:
http://www.simpaticus.com/small-netserver-fc3-howto.php
We need to improve on this somewhat. But as a first step, we need to
make rhpl not depend on synaptics!
Cheers,
--
Rodolfo J. Paiz <rpaiz@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
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