Public SourceMage Discussion List

[Hamish Greig <hgreig AT bigpond.net.au>]

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On Wed, 10 Dec 2003 10:48, Andrew wrote:
> Theres _way_ too much stuff on the installed system. We've gone down
> this road before.
>
> is cpio really necessary? Apparently its sustained, but why?
>
> flex and bison are also installed and sustained for no apparent reason.
>
> autoconf/automake/libtool are all unnecessary.
>
> is lvm really needed?
>
> sysklogd is not necessary IMO, we've talked about this before...
>
> do glib and popt really need to be installed also?


Last ISO I filed a whole bunch of bugs about the unneeded software 
installed... feel free to comment on them.

some of the sustained spells (like flex and bison) are unlisted depends for 
major spells in basesystem and would cause random failures if not available. 
rather than spend valuable time finding all the spells that specifically 
depend on them,  A while back I suggested to make them sustained so the 
problem would automagically go away. They can become explicit depends of 
every spell that uses them (to compile/install) but it will take a long time 
too debug all 2500+ spells in the grimoire to find out what needs what.

A syslogger on a system with no passwords, no entries in /etc/hosts.*, no 
portmap, no firewall doesn't automatically make that system secure, but the 
bug I filed for it was closed, stating it was there for security reasons. 
I know it was included in the last ISO because of a bug in the init scripts 
that the ISO guru neglected to notify anyone of (so the fixed spell in test 
didn't get integrated) and any other "excuse"  is exactly that.

glib is a depends for xdelta, if the ISO installs sorcery with xdelta support 
turned "on" AND someone starts making xdelta's of sources it is needed, so it 
can actually be removed safely. An impromptu vote on another bug ruled me in 
the minority for wanting this.

Hamish
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