Hi,
I guess there has been some discussion about getting rid of packages to trim the distribution size somewhat. I wanted to point out a few candidates that might help.
*Byacc - bison covers this *autocon213 - expect & pkgconfig should be modernized. *automake14 - pkgconfig is the only thing needing this that I see *automake16 - gmp should be updated *automake17 - this is so close to 1.8.4 that anything needing it just needs: aclocal, automake, autoconf added to the spec file. They've all converted fine on my system. *passwd - shadow-utils has much if not all of the same functionality as this package. Why not try to consolidate to one package? Some of the utilities in shadow-utils are not packaged and therefore easily overlooked.
Then the other area that swings in the most packages is simply building the documentation during a compile. Some packages use doxygen, docbooks, linuxdoc, perl-SGMLSpm, etc. After the build, these packages probably get very little use on an average user's machine. This is an area that needs attention/consolidation. You would be surprised how many packages get swung in simply to make the documentation. I think I was able to jettison 20-30 packages by removing the above mentioned documentation packages and their dependencies.
I just wanted to thow those out in case it helps.
-Steve Grubb
__________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com
On Sun, Aug 01, 2004 at 09:24:13AM -0700, Steve G wrote:
Then the other area that swings in the most packages is simply building the documentation during a compile. Some packages use doxygen, docbooks, linuxdoc, perl-SGMLSpm, etc. After the build, these packages probably get very little use on an average user's machine. This is an area that needs attention/consolidation.
Install with --excludedocs - that is already covered
For a lot of the other stuff where you have patches you think are clear and justified do you want to start feeding them to Red Hat folks (me if you want) to merge into the base packages.
Alan
After the build, these packages probably get very little use on an average user's machine. This is an area that needs attention/consolidation.
Install with --excludedocs - that is already covered
This produces an artificial reduction in packages. You still needed the documentation packages to get the binary rpm. BuildRequires enforces this. What I'm angling at is do you really need docbook and linuxdocs and all the others? Can a translator be made to swing from a less capable to a more capable doc generator? Sorry if I'm picking on someone's favorite package, but there seems to be a lot of duplication of effort in this area.
If the project is happy with all these documentation generating packages, so be it. I just wanted to point out that this is an area ripe for refactoring.
-Steve Grubb
__________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com