Arch Linux

dawnofman

Member

Registered: 2019-07-26

Posts: 140

[solved] pacstrap with default base group vs given list

A few days ago I installed arch on a second machine and since the base package group is (at my personal point of view) becoming bloated nowadays I decided to run the pacstrap script without the base and base-devel groups and instead manually specifying the packages I only wanted.

I started with the full list of base and base-devel (plus some unrelated packages that match my use case such as vim, bind, postgresql, etc) and then I checked whether each default package in those groups made sense or not to me; I discarded a lot of packages for wireless networking which I do not need at all and things like nano, vi, inetutils, s-nail, etc. Probably there are a lot of things that I still do not need and/or won't ever need since I left intact packages that I am not sure what they do or why they are there in the first place.

Now I have a lean installation and so far everything is working fine.

Question is: is there any downside with this approach that I should be aware of ?

I previously toyed with a custom archiso installation but this approach (alongside a post-installation script to restore my custom configuration files) proved far more practical (at least to me).

#!/bin/bash

### where [/mnt/system/] is the directory where the root partition is (temporarily) mounted

pacstrap '/mnt/system/' \
   'apcupsd' \
   'arch-install-scripts' \
   'autoconf' \
   'automake' \
   'bash' \
   'bind' \
   'bind-tools' \
   'binutils' \
   'bison' \
   'bzip2' \
   'colordiff' \
   'coreutils' \
   'device-mapper' \
   'diffutils' \
   'dmd' \
   'dosfstools' \
   'e2fsprogs' \
   'exfat-utils' \
   'fakeroot' \
   'file' \
   'filesystem' \
   'findutils' \
   'flex' \
   'gawk' \
   'gcc' \
   'gcc-libs' \
   'gettext' \
   'glibc' \
   'gptfdisk' \
   'grep' \
   'groff' \
   'gzip' \
   'hwloc' \
   'iproute2' \
   'iputils' \
   'less' \
   'libtool' \
   'libxslt' \
   'licenses' \
   'linux' \
   'linux-firmware' \
   'logrotate' \
   'lsscsi' \
   'm4' \
   'make' \
   'man-db' \
   'man-pages' \
   'mkvtoolnix-cli' \
   'nfs-utils' \
   'nmap' \
   'ntfs-3g' \
   'ntp' \
   'openssh' \
   'pacman' \
   'patch' \
   'parallel' \
   'pciutils' \
   'perl' \
   'pkgconf' \
   'postgresql' \
   'procps-ng' \
   'psmisc' \
   'rsync' \
   'sdparm' \
   'sed' \
   'sg3_utils' \
   'shadow' \
   'sipcalc' \
   'smartmontools' \
   'sudo' \
   'systemd' \
   'systemd-sysvcompat' \
   'tar' \
   'texinfo' \
   'usbutils' \
   'util-linux' \
   'vim' \
   'which' \
   'zfs-linux' \
   ;

Last edited by dawnofman (2019-07-28 23:44:56)

jasonwryan

Anarchist

From: .nz

Registered: 2009-05-09

Posts: 30,424

Website

Re: [solved] pacstrap with default base group vs given list

Now I have a lean installation and so far everything is working fine.

This is the whole point of Arch. You are doing it right.

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