How does one get a clean installation of Fedora?

[Sam Varshavchik]

lee writes:

> Sam Varshavchik <mrsam at courier-mta.com> writes:
>
> > lee writes:
> >
> >> Sam Varshavchik <mrsam at courier-mta.com> writes:
> >>
> >> > lee writes:
> >> >
> >> >> Hi,
> >> >>
> >> >> how does one get a clean installation of Fedora?  "Clean" means that
> >> >> only those packages are installed that are actually needed and only
> >> >> those services are running that are actually needed.
> >> >
> >> > Very easy:
> >> >
> >> > Step 1: figure out what packages and services you need.
> >> > Step 2: install just those packages and services that you need.
> >>
> >> Unfortunately, the broken dependencies seem to prevent step 2 ---
> >> otherwise I could simply remove unneeded packages.
> >
> > Define "broken dependencies".
>
> The avahi-daemon is a good example.  It's not needed and cannot be
> removed without taking the system down because too many packages depend
> on it.

I just checked two of my servers, none of them have avahi-daemon installed,  
and both of them are running a full-featured desktop – there's over 2000  
RPMs installed; so it doesn't look like that package is really needed that  
much.

> > If what you want requires another package to be installed, you will
> > have to install it. That's not a "broken dependency". It's a required
> > dependency.
>
> For example, VLC, like many other things, depends on avahi and doesn't
> need the avahi-daemon.  So you end up not only having things installed
> you don't need, you also run software you don't need to run.

Hmm. I just tried "yum install vlc", and it was all set to be installed,  
without pulling in the avahi-daemon package.

> > Real broken dependencies are rare, and tend to get fixed easily.
>
> Apparently the dependency problems with the NVIDIA drivers were not
> fixed so easily, if they ever were.

What's an "NVIDIA driver"? I see no such package in Fedora.

Of course, I'm being facetious. I will not expect that any Fedora packager  
is going to worry, too much, about external RPMs. It's Nvidia's obligation  
to play nice with Fedora, not the other way around.

> For example, what is at-spi-bus-launcher?  It's running for unknown
> reasons and it doesn't have a manpage.  What is it for?  What does it
> do?  Do I need it?

rpm -q -f /usr/libexec/at-spi-bus-launcher tells you what it is. It's part  
of Gnome, so it's a fairly core daemon service.

This is really code bloat. The dependencies are not broken. There's a world  
of difference between broken dependencies, and code bloat.

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 198 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/users/attachments/20130729/300ba6f0/attachment.sig>