On Mon, Dec 11, 2017 at 4:32 PM, aleksander.baranowski aleksander.baranowski@yahoo.pl wrote:
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.
I never heard about that, but it might be true.
I've checked Ubuntu and Fedora packaging rules. Both say that packages must contain license files (in "/usr/share/doc" or as symlinks to common files for popular licenses). In fact, Fedora's rules for the cloud image state:
"Use new %license macro to separate license files from documentation, so the latter can be excluded from container images without stripping license information which must be included."
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/Use_license_macro_in_RPMs_for_package...
I was actually going to suggest that using "%_netsharedpath /usr/share/doc" instead of "%_excludedocs 1" (thus leaving man pages intact, which are just 20MB or so) might be a decent middle ground, but looking at these rules it seems upstreams want to make sure that license files are never left out. I didn't find a way to exclude files using a pattern, only by prefix.
rpm -qa --queryformat '%{SIZE} %{NAME}\n' | sort -rn CentOS comes with linux-firmware Fedora without. This package is about 126M when installed. I don't have any knowledge about indispensability of this package.
I removed it from a test VM and didn't notice any problems. It may be necessary for some devices that can be bypassed from the host into the VM, but I'd be suprised if the emulated virtualbox hardware required a firmware upload.
C.