Hi,
As mention in thread "Broken man pages in vagrant box 1710.01". There are packages that removal might be consider. First one is centos-logos. centos-logos are required by plymouth, that add animation during boot. In my opinion it's not necessary for Vagrant image.
Second one is kernel-firmware. This package don't have any further dependencies in libvirt image. As said libvirt image is working (in my case ofc, note that I don't have fully functional test suit for Vagrant images) without it. Fedora cloud image from https://app.vagrantup.com/fedora/boxes/27-cloud-base also lives without this package (at least libvirt box).
I want to notice that I'm unable to provide any additional information on different vagrant providers, so any critics are kindly welcome.
Bests, Alex
Hello everyone,
sorry for being so slow to answer: I moved closer to work mid-November, but I have no Internet access yet (that'll come sometime in January, hopefully). I'm afraid that changes to the Vagrant boxes will have to wait until then, at least as far as I'm concerned.
Regarding packages that could be removed, I already experimented with removing linux-firmware (which is indeed not needed by VMs), but Anaconda will always install it, since the kernel package depends on it; kernel upgrades will also install linux-firmware, if missing. It is possible to remove it in %post, just like Fedora does, but without being to able to run something like zerofree (centos/7 uses XFS, not Ext4), the size of the image remains the same - that's why I didn't push the changes to the official repo. I'll look into removing centos-logos as soon as I can, thanks for the suggestion.
We could make our images smaller by splitting the kernel package into a minimal kernel package that only contains the drivers needed by a VM, and a kernel-modules-extra with all drivers needed when running on real hardware (that's what Fedora did some time ago, and partially why their images are smaller). We can only hope that Red Hat will also do this for RHEL in the future.
Best regards, Laurențiu Păncescu
On 2017-12-11 17:55, aleksander.baranowski wrote:
As mention in thread "Broken man pages in vagrant box 1710.01". There are packages that removal might be consider. First one is centos-logos. centos-logos are required by plymouth, that add animation during boot. In my opinion it's not necessary for Vagrant image.
Second one is kernel-firmware. This package don't have any further dependencies in libvirt image. As said libvirt image is working (in my case ofc, note that I don't have fully functional test suit for Vagrant images) without it. Fedora cloud image from https://app.vagrantup.com/fedora/boxes/27-cloud-base also lives without this package (at least libvirt box).
I want to notice that I'm unable to provide any additional information on different vagrant providers, so any critics are kindly welcome.
Bests, Alex
On Sat, Dec 16, 2017 at 6:37 PM, Laurențiu Păncescu lpancescu@centosproject.org wrote:
Regarding packages that could be removed, I already experimented with removing linux-firmware (which is indeed not needed by VMs), but Anaconda will always install it, since the kernel package depends on it; kernel upgrades will also install linux-firmware, if missing. It is possible to remove it in %post, just like Fedora does, but without being to able to run something like zerofree (centos/7 uses XFS, not Ext4), the size of the image remains the same - that's why I didn't push the changes to the official repo. I'll look into removing centos-logos as soon as I can, thanks for the suggestion.
Can't the "linux-firmware" package be prevented from installing any files by setting "%_netsharedpath /usr/lib/firmware" during installation and then remove it in %post?
Also,
Can we get (at least) the man pages back? With the removal of centos-logos, the image size would remain about the same
Although it doesn't bother me the least, the license violation issues that may arise from removing "/usr/share/doc" should be considered.
C.
On 2017-12-16 19:58, Carlos Rodrigues wrote:
Can't the "linux-firmware" package be prevented from installing any files by setting "%_netsharedpath /usr/lib/firmware" during installation and then remove it in %post?
The proper fix would be for the kernel package not to define a dependency on the linux-firmware. Unfortunately, that hasn't happened yet, even in Fedora, when they split the kernel package.
Can we get (at least) the man pages back? With the removal of centos-logos, the image size would remain about the same
That depends on how many people complain about that until the next release (probably in February). I would also prefer minimal images, fast to create and destroy, to having the man pages included in every Vagrant instance - like other people here. I use linux.die.net as well.
Although it doesn't bother me the least, the license violation issues that may arise from removing "/usr/share/doc" should be considered.
"--excludedocs" is an official Kickstart option. If you can formulate an argument that using it violates the license of any package, please file a bug against CentOS and RHEL.
On December 16, 2017 11:24:17 PM GMT+02:00, "Laurențiu Păncescu" lpancescu@centosproject.org wrote:
On 2017-12-16 19:58, Carlos Rodrigues wrote:
Can't the "linux-firmware" package be prevented from installing any files by setting "%_netsharedpath /usr/lib/firmware" during installation and then remove it in %post?
The proper fix would be for the kernel package not to define a dependency on the linux-firmware.
That IS tricky because real hardware might not boot or lack network access without it. I did experiment once ( on a Dell with Broadcom network chipsets ) and I had to use the KVM to revive its network access after fiddling with the firmware package.
Can we get (at least) the man pages back? With the removal of centos-logos, the image size would remain about the same
That depends on how many people complain about that until the next release (probably in February). I would also prefer minimal images, fast to create and destroy, to having the man pages included in every Vagrant instance - like other people here.
I am very much in favor of NOT including the docs. I find them to be completely useless in minimal images. And I would also remove groff, not only man.
Although it doesn't bother me the least, the license violation issues that may arise from removing "/usr/share/doc" should be considered.
"--excludedocs" is an official Kickstart option. If you can formulate an argument that using it violates the license of any package, please file a bug against CentOS and RHEL.
Actually the bug(s) should be opened against the packages which do not install the license when excludedocs is used. The very reason of the separate %license macro (vs %docs) is exactly this one.
On Sat, Dec 16, 2017 at 9:24 PM, Laurențiu Păncescu lpancescu@centosproject.org wrote:
That depends on how many people complain about that until the next release (probably in February). I would also prefer minimal images, fast to create and destroy, to having the man pages included in every Vagrant instance - like other people here. I use linux.die.net as well.
Well... fair enough.
I don't expect much in the way of additional complaints, since it's easy to move to another image (and they all seem to keep the man pages). I just complained because I was fond of using this image in particular, but I'm already switching images myself (to "fedora/27-cloud-base") for these "vagrant box as an interactive machine" use cases.
C.
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aleksander.baranowski -
Carlos Rodrigues -
Laurențiu Păncescu -
Manuel Wolfshant