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Subject: Re: cmp missing from base
From: Warren Young <wyml@etr-usa.com>
In-Reply-To: <E962DB2A-209C-43FA-9620-CB7CC35245E1@etr-usa.com>
Date: Mon, 9 May 2016 12:58:26 -0600
Message-Id: <845CA311-A04C-491C-875F-34DE37149E6A@etr-usa.com>
References: <572C697E.1090408@towo.net> <29250DCF-60A0-4113-9834-25EA744E8F41@etr-usa.com> <E962DB2A-209C-43FA-9620-CB7CC35245E1@etr-usa.com>
To: The Cygwin Mailing List <cygwin@cygwin.com>
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On May 9, 2016, at 12:29 PM, Warren Young <wyml@etr-usa.com> wrote:
> 
> On May 6, 2016, at 7:41 PM, Warren Young <wyml@etr-usa.com> wrote:
>> 
>> On May 6, 2016, at 3:53 AM, Thomas Wolff <towo@towo.net> wrote:
>>> 
>>> after a recent fresh installation of cygwin, I was surprised that `cmp` was missing, which is part of the traditional Unix base commands.
>>> I think the diffutils package should be part of the base installation.
>> 
>> I wonder if the rule should just be “POSIX”?
> 
> I’ve come up with a much better rule: mimic the Minimal package set for RHEL.[1]

I decided to try a practical experiment: apply a simplified version of my rule set to a Cygwin Base installation.  My thought was that if the goal is to change Cygwin Base to be as close to RHEL Minimal as is practical given platform differences, that my exclusion rules 2 and 4 should be dropped.

A 64-bit Cygwin Base installation is currently 112 MiB as reckoned by du -sh on my system.  If you take that and add the packages in CentOS 7’s Minimal install that aren’t excluded by my exclusion rules 1 and 3, a “Cygwin Minimal” installation is 266 MiB.

That’s quite a jump in absolute terms, but still smallish by today’s standards.  The corresponding RHEL 7 Minimal installation is 1.2 GiB, by comparison.

This does drag in one major package that isn’t in RHEL 7’s Minimal set: perl, by way of postfix.  We’ve had repeated cases in the past where something in Base indirectly depended on Perl and dragged it in.  Maybe it’s time to give up on excluding Perl?
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