[oe] Questions regarding DISTRO = "minimal"

[Phil Blundell]

On Thu, 2009-07-02 at 15:04 +0200, Holger Hans Peter Freyther wrote:
> I have some questions to help me building a opinion regarding "minimal". What 
> is the differentiation between minimal and micro, minimal and angstrom. What 
> niche is minimal trying to solve? And is minimal the right name for it?

I think the old name of "generic" was probably a better reflection on
what I understood as the intended purpose of this distro.  That is, a
fairly plain system which imposes the minimum amount of policy
consistent with getting a working image.  As a result, what you'd get
would be more or less a vanilla Unix system, albeit a small one.  I
think this is still a worthy goal.

This is fairly different from the policy goals of "micro", which are
basically to produce an embedded system that's as small as possible,
with few concessions to providing a comfortable shell experience.  As a
result, the system that you get is less of a traditionally Unix-like
thing: it doesn't, for example, have the distinction between /usr/bin
and /bin since this is fairly meaningless if you just have a single
filesystem image.  Nor does it install a lot of the traditional
Unix-type utilities that are mostly or only used for interactive shell
sessions, things like "w", "mesg" and the like.

p.