[CentOS] 'Many' packages installed - CentOS 4.1

Bryan J. Smith b.j.smith at ieee.org
Thu Aug 25 17:36:18 UTC 2005


John Hinton <webmaster at ew3d.com> wrote:
> First, this is RedHat's direction, not something specific
> to CentOS (just cloning you know).

Forward upgradability has always been a catch-22.

But I think the problem in this case is that the gentleman
started with "Custom."  And if he enabled enough networking
services, he might have been touching enough GUI dependencies
that caused the bloat.  It's hard to avoid it, even in Debian
(although Debian's guidelines tend to reduce a lot of the
stupid inter-dependencies).

> This has been my complaint with RedHat products for some
> time now (about rh 7.3 or so).

One of the things Fedora Core 1 did off-the-bat was remove a
lot of the stupid inter-dependencies.  No, it's nowhere near
Debian in guidelines, but the Fedora developers have done a
great job in doing so.

Now Fedora Extras is trying to address the bloat issue. 
There is a real movement first the first time to "debloat"
Fedora Core as of version 5 or 6, and move everything else to
Fedora Extras.  I don't know how far this will go, but it's
the first time people on Fedora Development have been serious
about it.

How this will affect Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), I don't
know.  I have to assume Red Hat will not change its forward
compatibility, and it will still come with a lot of software.

Understand that anything Red Hat ships, they support with
Service Level Agreements (SLA) as low as a 4 hour support
time in standard contracts.  So it's actually in their
interest to keep bloat down.  But because of the lineage, I
seriously doubt this will change in the future.  The package
count will only get larger.

But also recognize what you _do_ get in RHEL/CentOS as
standard.  That's a lot more than other OSes for the same
GBs.



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