Re: Optional runtime dependencies in Guix

[Ludovic Courtès]

Gammel Holte <address@hidden> skribis:

> I disagree here. I have very functional Arch & Gentoo installs with no
> scripting language other than Perl, which is a dependency of many GNU tools.
>
> In particular I'm doing just fine without Python. Installing everything by
> default is a bit suboptimal from a security point of view, especially if
> you're adding loads of interpreters.

Yeah, adding loads of unused code in general is not very good.

> Also, if you're working on a constrained system, the fewer packages the
> better.

Another example is the USB installation image, which we do not want to
take too much space.  While tweaking it some time ago to reduce its
size, I noticed a few packages that would stealthily pull in a bunch of
big packages that were not strictly needed.

Ludo’.