Fedora 23 cloud image (and, for that matter, minimal anything) bloat

[Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek]

On Wed, Sep 23, 2015 at 03:28:57PM -0400, Matthew Miller wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 23, 2015 at 07:07:09PM +0000, Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek wrote:
> > Not really. localed is simply linked to libxkbcommon.so, so it will
> > not run without. Anyway, libxkbcommon.rpm is 260kb, so some potential
> > (complicated) scheme to avoid a dependency simply does not seem worth
> > the trouble.
> 
> No; bring brings in xkeyboard-config, which is over 5mb, putting it in
> the top 20 biggest packages. 5mb-on-disk isn't _huge_ but overall we
> grew 220mb on disk over two releases, and a whole bunch of "eh, who
> cares?" adds up. If it *got* us anything in terms of functionality,
> okay, I can sell that to people, but for the base, this is just bloat.

Bummer. The reason for libxkbcommon dependency is to be able to make
sure that the new config is valid. Before that was added we had a set
of rules and heuristics implemented in localed and regular bug reports
when typos and other mistakes were not caught by localed but Xorg
would not accept the new config. This is more important than might
seem, 'cause people tend to get grumpy when a misconfigured keyboard
mapping prevents them from typing in their password. So this dependency
does bring useful functionality.

Maybe it would be possible to change libxkbcommon to be able to provide
verification of the mapping configuration without having the mappings
installed, i.e. remove the dependency on xkeyboard-config. Then the
dependnecy on xkeyboard-config would have to be added to xserver or
to other consumers. I don't know if this is even feasible.

Zbyszek