[CentOS-devel] how minimal is a minimal too minimal

On Wed, Mar 19, 2014 at 5:01 PM, Stephen John Smoogen <smooge at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Support questions are always a problem. I have had many many many requests
> where telling someone that if they ran this script it would download and fix
> their problem and then be told it is too much work and they would rather use
> X instead.

People should be suspicious of having to get some external script to
fix a problem since that means it wasn't designed well in the first
place.   But running an included command already designed for the
situation should be reasonable for anyone who has taken the 'build it
from tiny pieces' approach in the first place.

> Look this image isn't for general consumption. It is to solve a particular
> problem for a set of people who want to be able to have a box with 128 MB of
> RAM and 200 MB or less of disk space. That number of people who have this
> problem are large enough that Karanbir and others would like to solve it
> with a CentOS image. The people who use this sort of image just want an OS,
> some basic libraries and the ability to drop their tar ball of whatever on
> it and make it work. These balls will generally come with their own apache
> server, python or ruby etc etc in it. Everything outside of that is just
> wasted disk space to them.

But, there's no way to know what libs those things they want to add
will need.  And, in my opinion it should be criminal to distribute
code without a mechanism to obtain security updates.   Unless, of
course, that code doesn't have any flaws.  So I'd consider yum
essential except in the odd case of VMs that you'd re-create rather
than update, or where you have some other means of updating.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
      lesmikesell at gmail.com