Michal Jaegermann wrote:
The other issue is a dependency creep. Over time everything tend to depend on everything and you drop in into your set something seemingly innocuous and boom - you are installing half of KDE and artsd daemon even if you do not really have a sound card in that box (that is a description of a general trend so do not take program names too literally). IIRC Rodolfo bumped into that a number of times. This is not something you can solve "outside" if dependencies are not guarded carefuly in the first place.
This is an inevitable consequence of the UNIX tradition of compile-time, rather than runtime, configuration. Until that changes, it will be basically impossible to create binary packages that are both functional enough for a general purpose/desktop distribution and minimal enough for a "stripped down" server. Gentoo represents one approach to this issue; the only other one I can think of would be to created a large number of duplicate packages -- foo-desktop and foo-server, bar-desktop and bar-server, etc. -- ======================================================================== Ian Pilcher i.pilcher@xxxxxxxxxxx ========================================================================