Bug 267982

Summary:	sys-apps/smartmontools doesn't build daemon with minimal flag
Product:	Gentoo Linux	Reporter:	Olliver Schinagl <oliver>
Component:	New packages	Assignee:	Gentoo's Team for Core System packages <base-system>
Status:	VERIFIED WONTFIX
Severity:	minor
Priority:	High
Version:	unspecified
Hardware:	All
OS:	Linux
Whiteboard:
Package list:		Runtime testing required:	---

Description Olliver Schinagl 2009-04-30 12:43:15 UTC

I was wondering wether it is the best idea to use the minimal flag to remove the smartd from the smartmontools package.

I can understand that if you want a minimal install, you want as little as possible. However I'm not sure whether the smartd should be omitted.

Let's say you want to build a NAS (those are quite popular today). Now the reason you'd want to install smartmontools is to ... monitor the disks. TO occasionally peek at them, sure, but mostly to ensure they are okay and to warn the admin when something bad is about to happen. Such a NAS would want the minimal amount of packages installed for sure, ulibc if possible, no docs, no man pages etc. So the minimal flag does make perfect sense for such a system.
Having your disks monitored (and occasionally tested for faults) however is a crucial for something as a NAS .. or pretty much anything with a disk in it. You usually don't want your disks failing randomly. Of course in a crucial system you'd have a raid in there and it should inform you when the array has failed.

So I recommend that we keep the daemon even when the minimal flag is set, and strip out the docs etc in a minimal smart package. True one can always omit the minimal flag for this package, but I believe smartd is crucial enough for the smartmontools to be still part of it. Maybe there is a secondary useflag (allready available) that would suit this purpose? no-daemon or the like (just a guess here)?

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:

Comment 1 Patrick Lauer gentoo-dev

2009-04-30 21:09:59 UTC

I don't see the point ... you want minimal with all features. That's ... not minimal! But let the maintainers have a say in this :)

Comment 2 Olliver Schinagl 2009-05-01 13:11:40 UTC

I do agree, partially, I just feel that the daemon is a little more important then just a minimal smartctl tool.

Comment 3 Robin Johnson archtester

2009-05-01 13:20:15 UTC

No.

Docs are normally excluded elsewhere, not with minimal.

There's always package.use if you want something in a global-minimal system to be non-minimal.

Comment 4 Olliver Schinagl 2009-05-01 13:22:54 UTC

I still do think, that smartd should be part of a minimal setup. It is quite crucial when monitoring disks. At the very least a big warning after installing that the daemon is not installed and it will not do any monitoring?

Comment 5 Robin Johnson archtester

2009-05-01 13:47:30 UTC

Done, in metadata.xml and an einfo.