Minimizing packages

Minimizing packages

Posted Jun 28, 2007 11:29 UTC (Thu) by aglet (guest, #1334)
In reply to: Minimizing packages by jmorris42
Parent article: Counting vulnerabilities

Given that dependency definition and management is one of (maybe the most!) important task in preparing a Linux distribution, I have to say I'm disappointed in RedHat. Trying to work out *why* things are installed on the system is always a pain, and the mix of "file", "library" and "package" dependencies makes it worse. It took me a while to figure out what was bloating it out, and how to keep it small, in the end I ended up with this in a kickstart file:

%packages --resolvedeps --nobase
@ core
openssh-server
up2date
# ... extra packages go here...

Including my app support bits & bobs, I wound up with about 180 RPMs or so -- this seems to be about the minimum to have a box that is actually useful.
I found rpmgraph helpful in visualising where things were coming from (I used poster to print the diagram out)
Perhaps it's better with yum (I'm still on RHEL 4), but I also loathe up2date with a passion. RHN is also annoying -- why no interface that I can use from the command line? I hate having to visit a web page to manipulate the subscriptions, I'm seriously considering wrapping it with Mechanize, then exposing it as a RESTful interface...

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