While working on the Workstation live image size today, I noticed
something interesting. Currently, the @core group definition includes
both:
<packagereq type="mandatory">dhcp-client</packagereq>
and:
<packagereq type="default">NetworkManager</packagereq>
these are somewhat redundant. NM in its default config does not use
dhcp-client (AFAIK). It has its own DHCP implementation.
dhcp-client itself is small, but it depends on ipcalc, and ipcalc
recommends geolite2-city, which is 62M big. So with weak dependencies
enabled, @core arguably pulls in 62M of stuff that isn't really needed.
The fact that dhcp-client is considered 'mandatory' while NM is
considered 'default' is a wrinkle, though the meaning of that is more
fuzzy than it was a long time ago. One thing I know it means is that
dnf will let you remove 'default' packages while still considered the
group to be "installed", but removing 'mandatory' packages causes it to
consider the group to no longer be installed. I'm not sure if it has
any other real consequences these days. (What it *used* to mean, over a
decade and two anaconda interfaces ago, was that you could uncheck
'default' packages in the anaconda package selector, but not
'mandatory' ones - remember that?)
I did a quick test of the consequences. I did a fresh minimal install
of F43 Beta. Indeed it had NetworkManager, dhcp-client and geolite2-
city all installed. According to df, the install used 914M of space on
the root partition. I did a 'dnf remove dhcp-client', and dhcp-client,
geolite2-city and a couple of other deps went away. Now only 860M of
space was used on the root partition. I rebooted and the network still
came up fine.
So...what do folks think? Is this fine? Should we drop dhcp-client from
core? Do something else?
Thanks!
--
Adam Williamson (he/him/his)
Fedora QA
Fedora Chat: @adamwill:fedora.im | Mastodon: @[email protected]
https://www.happyassassin.net
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