[Yum] slimming down -- runaway dependencies

[R P Herrold]

I was doing some weekend afternoon testing of the current yum
daily, and for cAos development.  I built a small, clean
machine, to pare down further.

[herrold at router herrold]$ df
Filesystem           1K-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda2              9447440    454392   8513140   6% /
/dev/hda1                99043      9168     84761  10% /boot
none                     14660         0     14660   0% /dev/shm


Before doing the pareing further, I though I would snapshot 
and print a baseline. I ran: 

   rpm -qa --qf '%{name}\t%{size}\n' | sort > minimum-rpm.txt

to get a manifest, to further attack.  I killed of a few fat 
packages, using this to hunt with.

  sort +1 -n < minimum-rpm.txt

Then I went to temporarily toss on a printer configuration
tool, to get lpd and a good remote printer into /etc/printcap

[herrold at router herrold]$ sudo yum -y install redhat-config-printer-tui
Password:
Gathering header information file(s) from server(s)
Server: Red Hat Linux 9 - i386 - Base
Server: Red Hat Linux 9 - Updates
Finding updated packages
Downloading needed headers
Cannot find a package matching redhat-config-printer-tui
[herrold at router herrold]$

... no worries, I thought.  I'll pull the complete package. It 
cannot be too big.

[herrold at router herrold]$ sudo yum -y install  redhat-config-printer
Gathering header information file(s) from server(s)
Server: Red Hat Linux 9 - i386 - Base
Server: Red Hat Linux 9 - Updates
Finding updated packages
Downloading needed headers
Resolving dependencies
....Dependencies resolved
I will do the following:
[install: redhat-config-printer.i386]
I will install/upgrade these to satisfy the depedencies:
[deps: perl-HTML-Parser.i386]
[deps: chkfontpath.i386]
[deps: perl-libxml-enno.noarch]
[deps: perl-HTML-Tagset.noarch]
[deps: XFree86-libs-data.i386]
[deps: gimp-print.i386]
[deps: XFree86-xfs.i386]
[deps: Omni-foomatic.i386]
[deps: perl-libwww-perl.noarch]
[deps: ttmkfdir.i386]
[deps: m4.i386]
[deps: libjpeg.i386]
[deps: mpage.i386]
[deps: ghostscript.i386]
[deps: ghostscript-fonts.noarch]
[deps: libxslt.i386]
[deps: pnm2ppa.i386]
[deps: perl-DateManip.noarch]
[deps: alchemist.i386]
[deps: PyXML.i386]
[deps: perl-libxml-perl.noarch]
[deps: VFlib2.i386]
[deps: urw-fonts.noarch]
[deps: fontconfig.i386]
[deps: perl-XML-Twig.noarch]
[deps: cups-libs.i386]
[deps: XFree86-Mesa-libGL.i386]
[deps: perl-Parse-Yapp.noarch]
[deps: perl-XML-Dumper.noarch]
[deps: perl-URI.noarch]
[deps: foomatic.i386]
[deps: perl-XML-Grove.noarch]
[deps: XFree86-truetype-fonts.i386]
[deps: XFree86-libs.i386]
[deps: libtiff.i386]
[deps: libpng.i386]
[deps: Omni.i386]
[deps: perl-XML-Encoding.noarch]
[deps: perl-XML-Parser.i386]
[deps: XFree86-font-utils.i386]
[deps: freetype.i386]
Getting perl-HTML-Parser-3.26-17.i386.rpm
... <process interrupted>

Amazing.  I almost wonder how fat it would be.

So I got to scripting, and dinked out a script to determine 
what is cruft, and what is needed, according to the rpm 
dependency database, for a given set of packages.

script at: ftp.owlriver.com in /pub/local/ORC/k12ltsp/
as strip_to_min.sh

As a couple of the cAos people were wondering about minimal 
package sets for an RPM database consistent system, I make it 
available.  

I think I'll feed the results to anaconda, and see 
if it will boot.  As as cross check, I'll use yum to remove 
everything NOT listed.   But not on a system I care about.

-- Russ Herrold