On 02/25/2018 07:17 PM, Bill Cole wrote:
The package that don't matter are just taking a little bit of space,
and it is hardly worth building a system by hand to save a tiny amount
(percentage-wise) of space.
But storage footprint is re-emerging as an issue with the rise of
"cloud" systems like AWS that bill for storage in fine granularity.
Sure, it is difficult to find a new physical machine with less than
256GB of SSD or 1TB of spinning rust these days, but if you're running
virtual machines on someone else's hardware with that sort of root
storage you are almost surely Doing It Wrong and bleeding money
pointlessly.
Storage footprint is also back in the sysadmin's eye when deploying
equipment on very small boxes or blades with SSDs implemented in M.2
form factor.
Further, deleting unnecessary packages reduces the effort in performing
security audits, particularly for "sensitive" computers. The fewer
things you have to examine, the faster the audit goes.
Any process requiring M4, or whatever, should check for it FIRST, to
minimize the need to pick out a failure in the middle of a log. To do
otherwise could be easily classed as "astonishing" behavior.
