On Thu, 2004-11-18 at 09:08 -0800, Donnie Berkholz wrote:
> OK, here's some more info on minimal, pulled straight from searching the
> ebuild for occurrences of "minimal":

I'm pleased to announce that USE=minimal now actually produces something
usable. In fact, I'm writing this email from a USE=minimal build. The
full installation is 26MB.

Updates for the latest version:

1. Only a minimal cadre of fonts are built. I think a quick command can
show this best:

donnie@supernova ~ $ du -sh /usr/share/fonts/misc/
188K    /usr/share/fonts/misc/
donnie@supernova ~ $ du -sh /usr/share/fonts/encodings/
820K    /usr/share/fonts/encodings/

My bet is that most (if not all) of the encodings can also be removed
for a small additional savings.

This compares with a typical customized installation with
USE="-bitmap-fonts":

donnie@supernova ~ $ du -sh
xorg-unpacked/xorg-x11-6.8.0-r1/usr/share/fonts/
21M     xorg-unpacked/xorg-x11-6.8.0-r1/usr/share/fonts/

With USE=bitmap-fonts (the default), it would be quite a bit larger.

2. A minimal set of clients is built -- enough to run `startx` and add
new fonts with.

3. The video drivers (on x86) have been reduced to an absolute minimum,
as discussed elsewhere on this thread.

4. USE=minimal is independent of other USE flags, so people could
potentially enable a minimal build plus TrueType fonts.

5. Where to find additional savings is unclear. Perhaps rarely used
extensions or libraries could be avoided. Suggestions are welcome.

Thanks,
Donnie