Minimal Debian install image not so minimal

[galaxial]

A number of packages in the Debian (sarge/3.1) minimal install are nonsensical in the virtual environment:

syslinux
pcmcia-cs
lilo
mbr
fdutils
dhcp-client

While it may be that some/all of these packages would be useful for some development purpose, none of them makes sense to me here.

[matta]

I believe they are part of the debootstrap process and are needed for dependencies. If I can be corrected I will see about removing them.

[galaxial]

Quite a bit of the packages included in debootstrap are not required to get the system running. Some of them are just considered "a really good idea". My point with the above packages is that they require hardware to be useful, and since this is a virtual host, that can never be.

I removed all of them, and apt-get did not notify me that any other packages would be orphaned by the action. That is, nothing depends on them.

Further, i was able to remove a number of libraries that the above packages depend on, also with no ill effects. I didn't note them, but after removing, you can install and run deborphan to find library packages that are now "leaf nodes".

[gioeleb]

I think that also

ppp
pppconfig
pppoe
pppoeconf
setserial
shellutils, textutils and fileutils (dummy packages for people upgrading from previous 'stable')
stress

could be removed from the minimal setup.

BTW I think that bzip2 should be added to the minimal setup. It is pretty common, isn't it?

[matta]

I've implemented all changes to the debian -minimal images that were mentioned.