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

Wed Mar 19 21:37:37 UTC 2014
Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com>

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.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
     lesmikesell at gmail.com