do we want `less` and `man` in the default cloud image?

[Matthew Miller]

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?





* Footnote: I see that groff is split into groff-base and groff, with the
former being "only necessary parts of groff formatting system which are
required to display manual pages, and the groff's default display device
(PostScript)". But, man requires less, and less requires the main groff
package.  So if we fix that, total impact is 4.6MB.




-- 
Matthew Miller  ☁☁☁  Fedora Cloud Architect  ☁☁☁  <mattdm(a)fedoraproject.org&gt;

[Bill Nottingham]

Matthew Miller (mattdm(a)fedoraproject.org) said: 
>  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? 
There was a request to add less explictly to the minimal install a while ago -
in assorted earlier releases it was pulled in indirectly via a dependency from
gzip (!).

>  * Footnote: I see that groff is split into groff-base and groff, with
> the
>  former being "only necessary parts of groff formatting system which are
>  required to display manual pages, and the groff's default display device
>  (PostScript)". But, man requires less, and less requires the main groff
>  package.  So if we fix that, total impact is 4.6MB. 
Why does less reqiure the main groff package? Is that an accident?

Bill

[Matthew Miller]

On Fri, Oct 19, 2012 at 12:22:38PM -0400, Bill Nottingham wrote:
>  Why does less reqiure the main groff package? Is that an accident?
Yes, I think so. The groff-base split was added only a few months before the
less package added groff as a dep, and probably the packager just wasn't
aware. I tested it wit the rpm -e --nodeps hammer, and both man and less
work fine.

<https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=868376>



-- 
Matthew Miller  ☁☁☁  Fedora Cloud Architect  ☁☁☁  <mattdm(a)fedoraproject.org&gt;

[Garrett Holmstrom]

On Fri, Oct 19, 2012 at 8:58 AM, Matthew Miller
<mattdm(a)fedoraproject.org&gt; 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.  ;-)

[Bill Nottingham]

Garrett Holmstrom (gholms(a)fedoraproject.org) said: 
>  On Fri, Oct 19, 2012 at 8:58 AM, Matthew Miller
>  <mattdm(a)fedoraproject.org&gt; 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

[Matthew Miller]

On Fri, Oct 19, 2012 at 02:37:07PM -0400, Bill Nottingham wrote:
>  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. 
Y'know, if less is called as 'more', it acts as a posix-compatible drop-in
replacement....

Oh, I see that the default `more` is part of util-linux. Eh, never mind
then. :)

-- 
Matthew Miller  ☁☁☁  Fedora Cloud Architect  ☁☁☁  <mattdm(a)fedoraproject.org&gt;

[Kurt Seifried]

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Hash: SHA1

On 10/19/2012 09:58 AM, Matthew Miller 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.) * 
One comment: unlike most programs the functionality aspect of "man"
can be replicated by using man on another system or online man pages
(and by definition anyone using Fedora in the cloud will have access
to at least the online versions of man pages).

- -- 
Kurt Seifried Red Hat Security Response Team (SRT)
PGP: 0x5E267993 A90B F995 7350 148F 66BF 7554 160D 4553 5E26 7993

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