Baslinux mailing list

[<keesan2 AT cyberspace.org>]

On Thu, 8 May 2003 qwms-avib AT dea.spamcon.org wrote:

> keesan2 AT cyberspace.org wrote:

> And as I mentioned earlier, pkgtool depends on
> the bin.tgz package.

I thought you said it depended on one (1) file found in bin.tgz, not on
the whole package.

> 
> > so there cannot be too much essential in there.  
> 
> That depends on how you define essential.  My goal 
> was to provide a foundation that behaves like Slackware 
> (including the full Slackware package management system).

I don't see how pkgtool is any more essential than modprobe, or why you
should need to download 1M of package (which expands to 2M) in order to
get one file needed to run pkgtool.  The 2M could be used for more useful
and less redundant programs.  


Why is pkgtool any more essential than modprobe?  It took me several weeks
to get mdacon working because the instructions called for modprobe -
meaning that BL2 was not behaving like Slackware.  (Someone at Linux
Gazette helped a lot).  You explained that insmod can be used instead of
modprobe.  I have not found any need for pkgtool, you can use installpkg
and removepkg.

Instead of having people all install a 1M package, I am asking that as an 
option  you make that one file available for download from your
site for people who want to use pkgtool instead of installpkg and
removepkg, and save 2M of hard drive.  And if you included any of the
other 8 packages in your suggested minimum that had only one or two
essential files in them, also post those files separately for people who
don't want to download large packages to get them.  (I also have a 33K
modem, and my 120M of hard drive available for Linux is filling up fast.) 


> > Could you just pick out whatever file or files you 
> > consider important in there (to avoid error messages)
> > and make your own package instead of bin.tgz?  And 
> > also do the same for fileutls?
> > Is it possible to offer one bl2.tgz package instead
> > of the four 
> 
> That's what I did with BL1.  If you want a compact,
> minimalistic installation, it's hard to beat BL1.
> But the goal of BL2 is different:  a minimalistic
> ramdisk that transforms itself into a real Slackware.

I don't think I want 'real' - I want just the programs I am likely to use
and I have so far done fine without ANY of what is in bin.tgz.
(Rpm2targz is the only one that looks useful for my purposes).  BL1, as
you have pointed out before, won't let you use binaries compiled for
glibc6.  I don't have hard drive space for a compiler.

> 
> > and give people the choice of downloading your package, 
> > or using the four complete slackware packages (in case 
> > they have the CD)?

> I expect most people who install BL2 to HD will use
> the Slackware 7.1 CDrom (by burning their own or
> buying it for $1).  Installing from CDrom is *much*
> simpler.

It is also simpler to go out and buy RAM instead of trying to run Linux on
4M RAM (or to buy a new computer and run the latest greatest distribution
instead of Basiclinux) but there are those of us who don't want to buy
things in order to run Linux on our old computers.  Do many 486s
have CD-ROM burners in them?

Also why fill up 2M of hard drive (even if you don't need to do a 5 min
download) just to get one file?  I am only suggesting that you offer an
alternate installation without some of the 8 packages, and post the more
useful files from these packages, such as whatever you need if you want to
use pkgtool, and rpm2targz, and ar and its dependency.  That way people
with CDs who preferred to stuff the whole 2M from a package onto their
large-enough hard drive could do so, and those of us without CDs and/or
with smaller hard drives, or who simply don't like filling up their
computers with programs they will never use, would have the option of
installing only what we were likely to use, without having to spend 20
minutes downloading and unpacking each package first. 

Do I actually need to have all 8 packages in a /slakware/ directory in
order to install BL2 to hard drive? Could I install with only four of the
packages, using your install-to-hard-drive setup from the RAMdisk version,
and then add whatever files I need later?  Which four packages were the
ones you had hoped not to need?  I will be doing a new installation soon
(to a pentium).  What files do I 'need' from fileutils.tgz?   Which four
packages are absolutely necessary?