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

Wed Mar 19 22:01:22 UTC 2014
Stephen John Smoogen <smooge at gmail.com>

On 19 March 2014 15:37, Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Wed, Mar 19, 2014 at 4:24 PM, Stephen John Smoogen <smooge at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >
> >>
> >> I'm looking at this from the support perspective. "I installed the micro
> >> variant, but there's no yum to install more packages?" -- "Correct, the
> >> micro.iso does not contain yum, you will need to download and burn and
> >> install the minimal.iso if you need that [or jump through other hoops]"
> >> -- "Well that sucks, I'm switching to $some_other_distro."
> >>
> >
> > Having dealt with that kind of support question for 15+ years... they are
> > usually going to say that no matter what. It is a game of whatif you
> can't
> > get past because this type of person is mostly looking for an excuse not
> to
> > use you versus seeing it as something they should have known.
>
> Sure, but support questions aren't really a problem if you have an
> answer like 'run this one-line, easily typed command" and the issue is
> resolved'.   For pretty much anything but yum, that command is 'yum
> install some_list_of_stuff'.   If you leave out yum, you need some
> functional equivalent to get it - which might be considerably smaller
> than yum but still non-trivial since it needs to find the current
> version and all its dependencies.  Maybe that list of packages could
> be maintained externally in a way that rpm could get them directly,
> though,.
>

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.


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.

-- 
Stephen J Smoogen.
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