On Wed, 2006-04-19 at 15:50 +0200, Johannes Winkelmann wrote:
1. We list all runtime dependencies except for gcc (libstdc++) and glibc.
Indeed, we are senseful people that don't need everything automated (like many other distros are trying to do, and almost always end up getting in the way.)
2. 'core' contains essential packages for a CRUX system, and our scripts and ports expect them programs provided by 'core' to be installed; this means that a) build dependencies provided by core are _not_ listed in the dependency header b) run-time dependencies from core which aren't dynamically linked in are not to be listed, either
This would imply that: - we have proper dependency trees for all libraries, no matter where they are in the ports tree
This is pretty neat, especially with the new recursive prt-get "dependent" command :)
- no additional cruft by adding tools like grep etc.
That would indeed be overkill. Now, the reason I was arguing that it wouldn't be completely senseless to add perl as a dependency for things like perl modules is that upgrading perl could then trigger all perl modules to be rebuilt, which is necessary because of perl's x.y.z versioning of its module directory. Also, perl is huge and provides relatively little compared to coreutils & friends, so people who want to strip down a system would probably be better off stripping perl before any of the others :)
The only alternative I can think of is to move more libraries to opt, like curl and openssl (which implies that we either move wget to opt too, or remove its ssl support again), which has more or less the same effect though.
While openssl has become very widely used and can add functionality to a lot of applications that is stronger than what tcp_wrappers has to offer (to take a similar core package), it's actually possible to run fully bloated server/workstation systems without curl, so taking that out probably wouldn't be such a bad idea. Cheers!