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

[Jonathan Groll]

On Sun, 2 Jan 2011 14:29:51 -0500, "Jonathan J. M. Katz" <jon at jonworld.com> wrote:

> On Sun, Jan 2, 2011 at 2:22 PM, Phil Stracchino <alaric at metrocast.net> wrote:
> > Frankly, the entire *BSD userspace is a bit on the primitive side.  What
> > I don't understand about this is that the true *BSD zealots (of which
> > there fortunately seem to be none on the list that I am aware of) appear
> > to regard it as a point of pride.
> >
> > "Diff, patch, and vi are effete.  When I were a lad, we patched our
> > kernel code with ed, and we LIKED it!"
> 
> This is going to dissolve quickly, but frankly I like a primitive
> userspace. With less stuff, there is less stuff to break, and the
> system will only have the components you want.
> 
> 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!
> 
> 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.

That's why I tend to like a Debian base install, and to install the
packages that I want afterwards. Of course, sometimes one is forced to
go the Red Hat route.

Cheers,
Jonathan
--
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