cracklib-dicts is 8.5M

[sj]

in ship.2, we devote 8.5M of disk space to cracklib-dicts.

This seems like a lot for a system that doesnt support user passwords. ¿Can we leave the dicts out or repalce with stubs?

[sj]

More generally, see #5535.

[cscott]

From duplicate #7388: Cracklib-dicts takes up 8M of our NAND. As discussed in #4281, it is unnecessary for OLPC. We should create a subpackage upstream called 'cracklib-dicts-minimal' or some such which contains a drastically cutdown version of these dictionaries, or fix pam so that it doesn't depend on cracklib-dicts.

[dsd]

cracklib-dicts-minimal doesn't seem realistic: we would have to fork pam anyway. pam has a hard Requires: on cracklib-dicts, and as cracklib-dicts is not a virtual package, it is not possible to create a -minimal version which pretends to be the real one.

As an experiment I placed a forked pam in my public_rpms for the next joyride. Let's see what effect that has.

[dsd]

my fork is just PAM compiled without cracklib support, and the Requires dropped.

[dsd]

fixed this without forking, but putting code in pilgrim to replace the dictionaries with an empty one which occupies 1kb.

[mstone]

In my opinion, it might be more appropriate to fork the package so that 'yum update' behaves correctly when new versions of cracklib-dicts are released. Comments?

[dsd]

In that case we may as well just fork pam to remove the libs. You're welcome to join the discussion on the devel list where we talked about that: "forking PAM to remove cracklib dependency"

It seems like a trade off between forking a package vs otherwise.