Re: do we want `less` and `man` in the default cloud image?
Garrett Holmstrom (gholms(a)fedoraproject.org) said:
On Fri, Oct 19, 2012 at 8:58 AM, Matthew Miller
<mattdm(a)fedoraproject.org> wrote:
> Continuing a discussion with gholms on IRC. There's a general question of
> how minimal we want the cloud image to be overall. I'd like to make it
> reasonably small (where reasonable is some hand-wavy value), but we're not
> ever going to be a stripped down TinyLinux or Damn Small Linux.
>
> Garrett makes the point that the Fedora images should "feel like Fedora".
We
> can probably discuss what exactly that means, but, okay, I can see that as a
> basic principle to weigh against "as tiny as possible". He also mentioned
> earlier that he has gotten feedback that people like to have man pages
> available. Right now, we're shipping about 6.2MB (on-disk) of man pages,
> but, um, no man browser. Adding man would add about 8.8M on-disk, as it
> pulls in groff and less. (Less is relatively tiny -- groff is the big
> thing.) *
>
>
> I really like having less around. I pretty much miss it on every system
> where it isn't installed. And installing all those man pages with no way to
> look at them seems silly.
>
> Thoughts? Non-binding votes?
The groff dependency is a bit unfortunate, but now that there's a bug
for it I'm less concerned about it. Man pages aren't particularly
useful without a reader. I suspect people have come to expect pagers,
too. So I'm in favor of that. ;-)
There *is* a page in the minimal install, but I suspect no one has their
fingers trained to automatically pipe things through more instead of less.
Bill