Date: Tue, 16 Sep 2014 10:02:18 +0800 From: Gregory Orange <gregory.orange@calorieking.com> To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Remove distribution sets Message-ID: <54179A2A.8090406@calorieking.com> In-Reply-To: <20140915120948.569f5458.freebsd@edvax.de> References: <54169E42.5020108@calorieking.com> <20140915120948.569f5458.freebsd@edvax.de>
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On 15/09/14 18:09, Polytropon wrote: > On Mon, 15 Sep 2014 16:07:30 +0800, Gregory Orange wrote: >> Can one remove distribution sets from FreeBSD 8.x? > > The system doesn't provide a _dedicated_ means to do this. Thank you (despite it being less than ideal news) - I wondered, but couldn't find anything stating it as such. > Basically it's possible to manually remove (delete) things > when you _know_ what you are doing. Removing manpages is > such a possible task that probably won't hurt. Have a > usable source tree at hand, so you can "make install" if > you accidentally removed something important, that's why > don't remove "make". ;-) Yes I neglected to mention this URL: https://forums.freebsd.org/viewtopic.php?&t=1136 Noone responded to edogawaconan regarding a register of the components installed. I'll have a play with it, and particularly with feebsd-update.conf and see how I go. > The best way to tune an installation is at install time. -snip- Agreed. I've just heard back from hosting provider: They only have one 8.3 OS image to install, and it has this extra material in it. They're not planning a 8.4 image, so I'll have to get us to 9.x or later at some point. > It's also possible to "prepare" a stripped-down system > elsewhere and then use it to replace the installation in > question. I wonder if I'll need to pursue that. I'd rather not. > A comparable way is provided via freebsd-update where parts > to be subject of an update can be selected using its configuration > file; see "man freebsd-update.conf" for the "Components" > keyword. This might be my best option. > Probably you won't save much disk space anyway... I don't care about the disk space. The aim is twofold: 1. Reduce any extra content that widens the risk profile on a machine. If code is present, there is some chance for it to contain bugs, which leads to some chance of a security risk. 2. Ease upgrades. Already the machine has a custom kernel which I need to replace with generic. The upgrade process requires a lot of manual intervention (see below), and I'll be dealing with a number of these machines. Manual intervention: lots of prompting with "these files don't match, what do I do?" and frustratingly, an editor session opens up to compare - in the vast majority (all but a handful) of cases the differences are just the header line which doesn't matter to me. I did find the file locations (I think it was /var/db/freebsd-update somewhere) and run an awk script to clean up those files, but the freebsd-update process still opened up every file, leaving me with a 'quit editor' keystroke - ZZ from vi turned out to be the fastest, but over hundreds of files, that's still messy. Cheers, Greg.
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