Re: [atomic-devel] Reducing the footprint of the Fedora docker base image

[Colin Walters <walters verbum org>]

On Wed, Feb 10, 2016, at 05:13 PM, Josh Berkus wrote:

> First, thanks for doing this!  It really shows a lot.  

Yep, nice work Courtney!

> I'd be really 
> curious as to what's in the remaining 144MB, given that Alpine and 
> BusyBox can get away with a userspace which is 25% of that size.

There's really no way to get to busybox's size without actually using
busybox, which in turn is basically a new type of base image.

> As Dan points out, we can't necessarily dispose of DNF/Yum during the 
> standard container build (i.e. Dockerfile).  However ... could we remove 
> them afterwards?

No, because while Docker layering does support deleting files, you still
download the original layer with all of the content.

The weak dependency approach for systemd though would help get rid
of some things.  And it's not just about size, but also ensuring we don't
have to rebuild containers for the next iptables security update.