This page documents the packages in the current @core group in Fedora's comps file. It is not the source of the comps file, nor is it authorative. It exists primarily to document the historical decisions which led to this selection of packages.

These packages are always installed and can't be removed by deselecting them with a -packagename in kickstart. Some of them may be removable with rpm -e (if not required by something else, of course).

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• Description: DHCP client daemon and dhclient-script
• Needed because: For dynamic addressing. Should be made non-mandatory for kickstarts for statically-addressed systems.
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• Description: Utilities for managing ext2, ext3, and ext4 filesystems
• Needed because: Contains e2fsck. Maybe should be made default instead of mandatory, in case entirely other filesystems are used.
• Other notes: This is a “leaf” package in core; nothing else pulls it in

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• Description: Show or set the system's host name
• Needed because: Used by the traditional initscripts to do just that.
• Other notes: It's still a dependency of the packages that require it; it may not need to be explicitly listed.

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• Description: Utilities for the console control library
• Needed because: This contains the `clear` command.
• Other notes: Not to be confused with ncurses-libs, the library itself

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• Other notes: scp in to the system won't work unless this is installed.

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• Description: The command-line utility for changing passwords
• Needed because: Not technically needed, especially for systems which use external auth or all keys. Could be set to “default” instead of “mandatory”
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• Description: Graphical boot animation
• Needed because: Previously was the only way to prompt for disk encryption passwords on boot; no longer necessary due to systemd.
• Other notes: A good candidate for removal.

• Description: contains the policy core utilities that are required for basic operation of a SELinux system.
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• Description: shell dotfiles for the root account
• Needed because: The main purpose of this seems to be to set aliases to force rm, cp, and mv to prompt on overwrite.
• Other notes: This is a really, really tiny package.

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• Description: System logging and kernel message trapping daemon
• Needed because: With systemd's new journal feature, it's not technically needed; the author of systemd has suggested that a feature to make the journal the default for F19 (but this has not yet been officially proposed, let alone accepted)
• Other notes: Even if systemd journal isn't the default, it may make sense to make this non-mandatory.

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• Description: A minimal version of the VIM editor
• Needed because: It would be very frustrating to not have an editor if, for example, the system came up without networking functioning and needed an adjustment.
• Other notes: Editor wars aside, this is the basic traditional text editor.

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These packages are installed by default and can't be deselected in the Anaconda UI but can be deselected with -packagename in a kickstart file.

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• Description: Mail Transport Agent (MTA )
• Needed because: Probably not technically needed, although cronie defaults to sending e-mail on errors. This is here because we have multiple packages providing MTAs and we wanted a deterministic result.
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Packages here were previously in @core, but have been removed. This is not a comprehensive list back to the dawn of Fedora, but will serve to provide history for some of our decisions.

Fair Use Source: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/SIGs/Minimal_Core) from Fedora.