Debian's which hunt [LWN.net]

Debian's which hunt

Posted Oct 29, 2021 20:43 UTC (Fri) by Deleted user 129183 (guest, #129183)
In reply to: Debian's which hunt by mti
Parent article: Debian's which hunt

> I have started to use 'pinfo' to read info pages.

Pinfo is good, but unfortunately the only distribution that I know of that installs it by default and actually aliases ‘info’ command to it is GoboLinux. Apparently filesystem isn’t the only thing that it does better than the usual GNU/Linux distributions. And those other distributions like to install by default lots of stuff that most people aren’t even gonna use once, like Vim, ‘rmt’ or ‘mailx’, so i guess Pinfo wouldn’t bloat them too much – though one can argue that it would also belong in _that_ category…

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Debian's which hunt

Posted Oct 29, 2021 20:57 UTC (Fri) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (2 responses)

If you want a distro that doesn't bloat your system, what about gentoo :-)

Okay, admin'ing your own system will get a bit harder, but you'll KNOW what's there and what it's doing, because you put it there and you told it what to do.

Cheers,
Wol

Debian's which hunt

Posted Oct 30, 2021 14:29 UTC (Sat) by Deleted user 129183 (guest, #129183) [Link]

> If you want a distro that doesn't bloat your system, what about gentoo :-)

Sure, there’s also Arch that doesn’t even include ‘man’ command in its base system.

But I don’t really care about bloat, if I did, I surely wouldn’t argue that Pinfo should be installed by default. I just think that the choice of default packages should be based on practical, rather than historical considerations.

Debian's which hunt

Posted Nov 2, 2021 8:06 UTC (Tue) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link]

The compiling-time argument may have become less important over the years, but you still have to lug around build dependencies for everything. When CUPS unexpectedly appears in the installation list, for instance, it's usually a sign that something's trying to smuggle yet another bundled copy of chromium onto your system. Or Java.