systemd requires HTTP server and serves QR codes

[Lennart Poettering]

On Tue, 09.10.12 01:00, Miloslav Trmač (mitr at volny.cz) wrote:

> > is any current data
> > available about how our minimal footprint got worse/better over time in
> > both terms of packages and disk space, and which packages are to blame
> > for it?
> >
> > If the libmicrohttpd dep really is problematic I am happy to split it
> > off, but I'd really like some hard data first whether doing this would
> > help more than a trivial bit to achieve a smaller minimal installation
> > set.
> 
> One more network-listening service, let alone an unauthenticated one,
> is way "more than a trivial bit" IMHO.
> 
> The disk space aspect is by far the most negligible of the four
> reasons for a minimal installation I have mentioned earlier today.
> (The cost of a megabyte of storage is practically indistinguishable
> from zero, and even multiplied by the number of Fedora users it is not
> a number that would inspire much work.)  If you are curious about
> specific data, I don't have it available; I'll ask around.

Well, I actually believe the disk space matters, since copying 1000
container images around with each costing 50M is quite a difference from
each costing 500M.

I wrote this little script now to generate a minimal container installation:

http://0pointer.de/public/miss.sh.txt

This will simply install SSH, systemd, passwd, and rpm into some
directory. This is enough to boot cleanly into it via "systemd-nspawn -b
-D <somedirectory>", and then log in and shut down the container
again. Note that this is much more minimal than what Fedora considers
the basic set. i.e. no kernel (not needed for a container), no syslog
(yay for the journal!) and  lacking a few other things.

Here's the data I gathered of the previous releases:

http://0pointer.de/public/miss/

The number of packages this pulls in:

Fedora 15: 131
Fedora 16: 134
Fedora 17: 120
Fedora 18: 106

We got much better here! Great work by everybody involved!

The disk space this takes up on disk:

Fedora 15: 591M
Fedora 16: 617M
Fedora 17: 442M
Fedora 18: 434M

Which is pretty OK, too, I guess.

To build such an image I'd really would have preferred not installing
the docs. It appears rpm once had a feature for that where you could add
excludedocs in rpmrc. This feature seems to have been removed. Why? Can
we get that back? Or can I enable this for yum in some other way? Anyone
has an idea?