Re: setup.hints which mention Base in their category

[Brian Dessent <brian at dessent dot net>]

Christopher Faylor wrote:

> alternatives/setup.hint                 gzip/setup.hint
> ash/setup.hint                          login/setup.hint
> base-files/setup.hint                   man/setup.hint
> base-passwd/setup.hint                  ncurses/libncurses5/setup.hint
> bash/setup.hint                         ncurses/libncurses6/setup.hint
> brltty/setup.hint                       ncurses/libncurses7/setup.hint
> coreutils/setup.hint                    ncurses/libncurses8/setup.hint
> cygwin-doc/setup.hint                   ncurses/setup.hint
> cygwin/setup.hint                       readline/libreadline4/setup.hint
> diffutils/setup.hint                    readline/libreadline5/setup.hint
> editrights/setup.hint                   readline/libreadline6/setup.hint
> findutils/setup.hint                    rebase/setup.hint
> gawk/setup.hint                         run/setup.hint
> gdbm/libgdbm-devel/setup.hint           sed/setup.hint
> gdbm/libgdbm/setup.hint                 tar/setup.hint
> gdbm/libgdbm3/setup.hint                termcap/setup.hint
> gdbm/libgdbm4/setup.hint                terminfo/setup.hint
> gdbm/setup.hint                         which/setup.hint
> grep/setup.hint                         zlib/setup.hint
> 
> (I obviously could have gotten this from setup.ini, too)
> 
> So the question is: Does this list look right.  I'm not sure about
> brltty and gdbm.  And I also wonder about ncurses, readline, and zlib.
> While they probably do get used by default anyway, I wonder why they
> have to be in Base.  Is there a broken dependency somewhere?  If not, it
> seems like they would be loaded automatically by anything in Base which
> needed them.

I agree that there should be no lib packages in Base but that they
should rather pulled in by dependencies of whatever needs them in Base. 
This saves us from having to garbage-collect the list of Base packages. 
For example, it looks like the only package that still uses the ancient
libncurses5 is the ancient libreadline4, and there is nothing that still
requires libreadline4.  Thus both of these seem to be now obsolete and
have no business in Base.

And libgdbm-devel?!?  Why would a -devel package be in Base?

I'm a little skeptical that diffutils needs to be in Base too.  Is there
some use of diff by core packages?

FWIW, I use the attached perl script to output a wget-able list of all
Base packages including dependencies, given a setup.ini as input.   It
also shows the total size, which as of removing brltty is

# total size: 14397244 (13.7M)

Brian

Attachment: cygwin_setup_basepkgs.pl
Description: Perl program