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

Wed Mar 19 19:43:58 UTC 2014
Stephen John Smoogen <smooge at gmail.com>

On 19 March 2014 10:32, Karanbir Singh <mail-lists at 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.
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