Re: On the quest for a new release model

[Ricardo Wurmus <rekado@elephly.net>]

Simon Josefsson via "Development of GNU Guix and the GNU System distribution." <guix-devel@gnu.org> writes:

> How much of the guix git repository content can you remove and still
> have a working OS?  In other words, can we strip away almost all of the
> packages and still have a minimal bootable system?  If we minimize that
> set of really-core packages, [...]

This has been discussed in the past and it is far from trivial.
Consider that glibc needs Python at build time and the Linux kernel may
need Rust.  Consider also that it is easy to introduce a package from
the outer ring to the inner ring through transitive dependencies.

Yes, there are many leaf packages, but it seems to me that it's a fool's
errand to attempt to separate packages like this.  (An exception is
package collections like those in CRAN or Bioconductor.)  It's certainly
not work that should be done manually.

We probably don't want to rehash this discussion as part of a discussion
about releases.

-- 
Ricardo