Re: [RFC 0/2] Remove Packages during Postprocessing

[Henning Schild <henning.schild@siemens.com>]

Am Tue, 25 Feb 2020 06:43:55 +0100
schrieb Gylstorff Quirin <quirin.gylstorff@siemens.com>:

> On 2/24/20 3:24 PM, Henning Schild wrote:
> > Hi,
> > 
> > my opinion on that is clear. Fix it upstream or live with those
> > packages. You are either on a distro or fiddle around and tune
> > everything until you are the only one on the planet testing your
> > setup. That is Isar vs. yocto ... whoever thinks they _need_ that
> > should maybe think again. If they need it they can put it into
> > their own layer or use yocto ;).
> > I do not think upstream should carry such hacky features unless we
> > get better reasoning ... Removing "required" packages has the
> > potential to break your image in funny ways ... that is much more
> > expensive than a few MB disc space. All affected packages are
> > likely already cleared and vulnerabilty monitored by someone else,
> > find that someone and share the cost!
> > 
> > Henning  
> 
> Hi Henning,
> 
> I understand your concern and I think you are right. But some people
> already hack the build process in similar ways and this is a way to
> give them some support.

I guess it might be a good idea to tell those hackers to comment here
or share their reasons with you. My guess is that their need is
questionable and they did not fully understand the consequences. It
should probably be discarded as premature optimization and removed from
the downstream layer, instead of added upstream.

Even if they carefully looked at the consequences for the packages they
remove, a generic upstream feature would ease the hack for people less
careful.
 
> I want to collect the option of community regarding this patch.

Sure.

Henning

> Quirin
> 
> > 
> > On Fri, 21 Feb 2020 15:53:46 +0100
> > "Q. Gylstorff" <Quirin.Gylstorff@siemens.com> wrote:
> >   
> >> From: Quirin Gylstorff <quirin.gylstorff@siemens.com>
> >>
> >> Some packages even if the are part of minbase are not necessary
> >> to run a debian system. Debian has some issues and experiments
> >> to remove packages from minbase [1]. This feature allows a
> >> expert user to remove packages from the final image during post
> >> processing.
> >>
> >> The reason for this are e.g. disk usage reduction and reduction
> >> of the clearing effort.
> >>
> >> The method to remove packages in postprocessing is a best-effort
> >> action.
> >>
> >> Another way would be to identify like [1] packages in
> >> minbase which can be removed without compremising the isar rootfs
> >> creation and remove them directly after or during bootstrapping.
> >> If a package is used for a production related feature it should be
> >> reinstalled.
> >>
> >>
> >> [1]: https://wiki.debian.org/BusterPriorityRequalification
> >>
> >> Quirin Gylstorff (2):
> >>    meta/classes: Add remove packages to rootfs postprocessing
> >>    meta-isar/images: Remove gcc-8-base from rootfs
> >>
> >>   meta-isar/recipes-core/images/isar-image-base.bb |  4 ++++
> >>   meta/classes/image.bbclass                       |  2 +-
> >>   meta/classes/rootfs.bbclass                      | 13
> >> +++++++++++++ 3 files changed, 18 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-)
> >>  
> >   
>