Some analysis on the size of the minimal and Server installs, of Fedora 23

[Michael Hampton]

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On 11/16/2015 08:39 PM, Stephen Gallagher wrote:
> With these two goals in mind, the most obvious approach to improving
> this situation would be by reducing the number of packages installed
> by default on the Minimal and Fedora Server installs. As a specific
> goal of the Server Working Group, we want to aim for a world wherein
> administrators will no longer desire to install the Minimal install
> and instead will rely on the platform provided by the default Fedora
> Server install. They do not do this today because the Fedora Server
> installation is considerably larger. I postulate that this is due
> primarily to dependency bloat, which is where we should focus our
> efforts during the Fedora 24 timeframe. I postulate (but have not yet
> confirmed) that there are likely many places where we could replace
> Requires: with Recommends: (or even Suggests:) dependencies. In my
> ideal world, the difference between a Minimal and Server install would
> be identical to installing the same set of packages with Recommends:
> on or off.

As someone who is using Fedora extensively for both physical and virtual servers, I can tell you that dependency bloat _per se_ is not why I use Minimal rather than Server as a base for server and virtual machine installs.

Rather, the issue for me is that Server installs many things I simply do not need or want.

For instance, while I have Docker container hosts, they are only a small percentage of my hosts, and so I do not want Docker installed on every server. But Server includes docker out of the box.

And, Server installs things which are only useful for physical machines (or at least, virtual machines bridged to the network) such as lldpad, openhpi, etc.

Finally, I'm installing necessary software for each server via Ansible anyway, so having something preinstalled, even if I wanted it, isn't very beneficial to me.

What I would like to see out of a Server looks a whole lot like Minimal does today, with the possible addition of cockpit and rolekit, and _anything_ else added either during installation as an optional choice, or after installation via rolekit, Ansible, Puppet, or whoever.

Along those lines, I would like to see Anaconda detect whether the system is a virtual machine, and automatically select for installation the _appropriate_ guest agents for the detected hypervisor, rather than _all_ of them, but this doesn't affect Server exclusively.

> Some specific observations I can make:
> * The largest difference in the Fedora Server install vs. the minimal
> install is due to the FreeIPA and Samba packages requiring the
> inclusion of the Python 2 stack; focusing on eliminating this
> requirement in Fedora 24 would have the largest impact on both the
> number of packages and the space on disk.

See above; my recommendation is to cut it to the bare bones, and install packages and groups of packages only on demand.

> * The largest individual package in both deployments is the
> glibc-common package. This is primarily due to the 106MiB
> locale-archive. I'd really like to hear from glibc folks if there is
> something we can do to break this up into smaller pieces contained in
> different sub-packages with Suggests: dependencies.

Can these not be split into separate packages per language, and then installed only if that language is requested?
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