On 19 March 2014 10:32, Karanbir Singh mail-lists@karan.org wrote:
Hi
Something that keeps coming up is how far can we minimalise an Instance / Image / Installer before we cant call it CentOS anymore. In the past, what we have generally stuck with is:
- CentOS Shipped kernel
- Initscripts
- functional yum
- functional openssh-server
- atleast all of @base
however, in some cases, openssh-server might not be needed, and initscripts has a fairly long dep tree, similarly making yum work needs a few things. Can we get away with losing yum as an example and replacing it with a script that says 'need yum? I can download and install it for you' and have it hit mirror.centos.org for static yum and yum dep urls ?
similarly, should nobase and nocore be acceptable ?
the aim being to setup a base image, that is under 150mb to download and deploy.
The bare minimum I have had to help groups get down to is basically a kernel+busybox with scripts that they could install whatever they wanted from there. As I see busybox isn't installed by default anymore on Fedora I can see this was a lot longer in the past than I realized. If there is a 'newer' shinier replacement to busybox I don't know what that is but it may be more of the 'way' to go these days.
I would call that a nano install. It should give you just enough to get other stuff onto a box to make it usable if you have the time and love to write the scripts to do the stuff that would need to get yum and other stuff working.