On 19 March 2014 15:37, Les Mikesell <lesmikesell@gmail.com> wrote:

On Wed, Mar 19, 2014 at 4:24 PM, Stephen John Smoogen <smooge@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>
>> I'm looking at this from the support perspective. "I installed the micro
>> variant, but there's no yum to install more packages?" -- "Correct, the
>> micro.iso does not contain yum, you will need to download and burn and
>> install the minimal.iso if you need that [or jump through other hoops]"
>> -- "Well that sucks, I'm switching to $some_other_distro."
>>
>
> Having dealt with that kind of support question for 15+ years... they are
> usually going to say that no matter what. It is a game of whatif you can't
> get past because this type of person is mostly looking for an excuse not to
> use you versus seeing it as something they should have known.

Sure, but support questions aren't really a problem if you have an
answer like 'run this one-line, easily typed command" and the issue is
resolved'. For pretty much anything but yum, that command is 'yum
install some_list_of_stuff'. If you leave out yum, you need some
functional equivalent to get it - which might be considerably smaller
than yum but still non-trivial since it needs to find the current
version and all its dependencies. Maybe that list of packages could
be maintained externally in a way that rpm could get them directly,
though,.

Support questions are always a problem. I have had many many many requests where telling someone that if they ran this script it would download and fix their problem and then be told it is too much work and they would rather use X instead.

Look this image isn't for general consumption. It is to solve a particular problem for a set of people who want to be able to have a box with 128 MB of RAM and 200 MB or less of disk space. That number of people who have this problem are large enough that Karanbir and others would like to solve it with a CentOS image. The people who use this sort of image just want an OS, some basic libraries and the ability to drop their tar ball of whatever on it and make it work. These balls will generally come with their own apache server, python or ruby etc etc in it. Everything outside of that is just wasted disk space to them.

Stephen J Smoogen.