further package removals/potential package removals

[Enrico Scholz]

Jeff Johnson <n3npq at nc.rr.com> writes:

>>If you think that the fact that Nautilus has a lot of "features" means
>>that it's necessary for it to cause the entire desktop as a single
>>unsplittable ball of mud, well, you have been misinformed.
>
> By George, I think he's got it! The point is that dependencies are not
> the problem,

The gnupg -> (perl,openldap) deps *are* a problem, because they are not
needed for the gnupg core functionality but only for two extra programs,
which are unused on most systems.


> bloat is.

Yes, the stupid kernel packaging which brings 30 MB of bloat into / is a
problem also. But nevertheless, the deps should be cut. A candidate would
be 'pam' which brings 'glib2' in, or all the packages with 'Requires:
kernel>=2.6' which should be either removed or rewritten to 'Conflicts:
kernel<2.6'.


> No, choosing locales is an install option that applies to binary
> options that is anaconda selectable,

I might be wrong (I do not have time to verify it now) but afair, on my
last FC3 installation, the language selection in anaconda had no influence
on %_install_langs but sets some value in /etc/sysconfig/i18n only.


>>>Try --excludedocs, been in rpm for years.
>>
>>I must have overlooked the Anaconda checkbox that turns that on.  And
>>the "yum update" option, too.
>
> So make an RFE.

Has probably only a small chance of success. 'anaconda' will follow more
and more the Gnome UI guidelines so that there is no room for useful
features. Existing ones like package selection or detailed progress
reports were removed already.


> The mechanism exists even if anaconda and yum choose not to use
> --excludedocs. The mechanism is also globally configurable, put
>     %_netsharedpath /usr/share/doc

mmmh... %_netsharedpath... we had a lot of fruitless discussions about
this so I wonder that you mention it here ;)

It has serious implementation flaws (infection of parent paths; bug
#52725 lasts for >3 years in bugzilla) and there does not exist a
mechanisms to test it in %scriptlets (which causes problems e.g. in
all the java packages).

Using %_netsharedpath to disable installation of certain files is not a
good idea.  E.g. files in /usr/share/doc are required by cups for its
web-frontend.  %_netsharedpath is for situations where the files exist
but are managed externally.


> in /etc/rpm/macros.

anaconda does not honor any previous rpm setting. Partially, this is
caused by rpm which makes it really difficultly to override paths of its
configuration.




Enrico