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.

Stephen J Smoogen.