[elbe-users] diet and removing dpkg

[Manuel Traut]

Hello Simon,

On 20:05 Wed 20 Mar     , Goldschmidt Simon wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> We're trying to build a tiny system using the diet mode. Unfortunately,
> some packages reference dpkg and perl-base (e.g. e2fsprogs), which makes
> the image kind of big (we're at ~33Mbyte unzipped).
> 
> Now I tried to <purge> dpkg and perl-base during finetuning, but that
> didn't work: even calling
>   'dpkg --purge --force-remove-essential dpkg perl-base'
> via <command> doesn't work as dpkg says '/var/lib/dpkg/status' is missing.
> 
> Any idea of how we could uninstall such essential packets without keeping
> a list an using 'rm'?

If you want a that small system probably the other way around is easier.
Use the <tighten/> mode and specify the list of packages you really want to
be on your system in the <pkg-list> all defined dependencies are ignored.
However post-install might fail and you probably need a few more finetuning
rules or files in the archive to get an working system. But for a very small
RFS it's probably the easiest solution.

Unfortunately there is no working tighten example in the current elbe. But
this [0] could help as a reference.

Regards,
Manuel

[0]
https://github.com/Linutronix/elbe/blob/devel/elbe-2.0/examples/armel-versatile-ubi-tightenmode.xml