[ale] minimalist package manager

[John Mills]

Stephen -

On Mon, 5 Apr 2004, Stephen Turner wrote:

> hey guys, ive been outta the loop for a little bit but was planning on
> getting a sweet little laptop :D i was gonna slap a linux on it but wanted
> one similar to gentoos portage except gentoo has a habbit of installing a
> "base" package of many programs. most of which i never use or atleast to
> my knowledge never use. in portage i set the optimizations and utilities i
> wish to be linked/ work with everything or select ones i dont wish to be
> used. such as perl and audio drivers. is there such a package manager? a
> true minimalist package manager that does optimizations? im wanting it to
> support the auto update like apt-get does, one command updates all
> installed packages. if such a tool exists i would much appreciate a link
> or name :) thanks guys.

As far as I know, RedHat does all this if you can run the installer in
your laptop: choose 'custom install' and identify only those packages you
know you want. The RH installer should then come up with the dependencies.  
Thereafter you would only pull updates for those things you actually
installed.

There is also the 'RULES' ("Run Up-to-date Linux Everywhere <Something?>") 
project and its 'SLINKY' installer. It is based on RH's RPMs.

Neither of those worked for me -- too minimal a laptop -- but
Slackware-9.1 installed very well, thank you. I chose a minimal set of
packages based on disk space. It doesn't have the update functionality,
though.

Good luck.

 - John Mills
   john.m.mills at alum.mit.edu