On Mon, Dec 11, 2017 at 12:00 PM, aleksander.baranowski aleksander.baranowski@yahoo.pl wrote:
Vagrant boxes by default should be as minimal as possible. Removing docs are one of most obvious steps to reduce size. I'm using mostly custom boxes so I didn't notice the change in CentOS default behaviour regarding man pages :(.
I agree, images should be minimal and one can always easily install more packages during provisioning. The problem is when instead of leaving complete packages out, the size reduction is achieved by dropping files from installed packages. If man pages were segregated into their own packages, I'd have no problem with this, but they aren't for most packages.
In this case, the image dropped by 65 MB by dropping files from installed packages. Interestingly, the Fedora 27 image is still 67 MB smaller than this and it keeps the man pages. I know they're not directly comparable, but it seems to me that this goal could have been accomplished without breaking use cases.
Also, I regularly use VMs based on other distributions for this purpose as well. Currenly, among Fedora, Debian, and Ubuntu, all of them keep the man pages in their standard images. I don't know if any of those provides an alternative slimmer image where they do more than just leaving complete packages out, but that's certainly an option.
In my use case using some automation platform to make proper provision of boxes is overkill (reinstalling whole system might be longer than actual work that this VM will make). So according to my current knowledge, btw - any suggestions are welcome :), there are two solution what might work for you:
Provisioning your own images is an alternative, yes. But doesn't that defeat the point of these images? Aren't they supposed to be generic images to cover most use cases? I think spinning short-lived VMs for interactive use is certainly a common use case. That's the use case I'm arguing for.
Some of the files in the "/usr/share/doc" may be required for compliance with some packages' licensing during distribution. I have no concrete examples of this, it's just something that occured to me.
C.