[rescue] Happy New Year! RIP, Sun/Solaris...

[Phil Stracchino]

On 01/02/11 14:29, Jonathan J. M. Katz wrote:
> For instance, I need to do smaller installs of CentOS for VMs for
> work. That's fine, but by default (both 5.5 and 4.8) they include
> things like postgres libs, dovecot IMAP, their apache, X11 etc. I then
> have to spend time removing crap I don't need that eats up disk space
> and causes library conflicts with $WORK's software. Although disk is
> cheap, I want a smaller footprint so VMs will upload quickly to
> headquarters over my limited upstream and fit on smaller thumb drives
> for training classes, etc. With CentOS if I use yum to remove
> "postgres-libs" which conflicts with $WORK's own postgres the system
> becomes unusable, because it removes system-config stuff!

Oh yeah.  Seriously.  I hear you.  And what's worse is when important
tools that you do need have been built with dependencies on crap you
neither need nor have any use for.

Solaris 10 has gotten kinda bad ...  out of the box, it has two versions
of Apache, neither of them up to date, and bits and pieces of three
different versions of Perl, not one of them current.

And speaking of Solaris 10, Gnome is TERRIBLE in this regard.  It gets
its infernal hooks into everything.


But still, my point on this score is that a small, lean userspace
doesn't *have* to be a small userspace made of tools that haven't seen
significant updates in ten years.  Heretical it may be, but my first two
installs on any Unix-alike OS that doesn't already have them are almost
always GNU coreutils and an up-to-date bash shell.


> The *option* of installing $KITCHEN_SINK is nice, because you know it
> is pre-rolled and all the dependencies are there, but for the tasks I
> do, it isn't the best deal.

*nod*  That's one reason that when I finally abandoned Slackware, I went
to Gentoo.  I get to not only have only the applications and tools I
care about installed, but I get to have them compiled against onluy the
*dependencies* I want installed.  If I don't want NetworkManager, I
don't have to have it.  If I don't want avahi or zeroconf, I don't have
to have them on the system, *at all*.  No Bluetooth hardware?  Then I
don't need Bluetooth support, do I?  [set flag and mask]  Not just gone,
but never installed in the first place.


-- 
  Phil Stracchino, CDK#2     DoD#299792458     ICBM: 43.5607, -71.355
  alaric at caerllewys.net   alaric at metrocast.net   phil at co.ordinate.org
         Renaissance Man, Unix ronin, Perl hacker, Free Stater
                 It's not the years, it's the mileage.