Inspired by Jorge, I decided to see how high a vrms score I could manage. I started with a minimal chroot (via mk-sbuild-lv), and did:
$ sudo -s
# echo "deb http://archive.canonical.com/ jaunty partner" >> /etc/apt/sources.list
# sudo apt-get update
# apt-get --no-install-recommends install $(grep ^Package /var/lib/apt/lists/*{multiverse,partner}*Packages | awk '{print $NF}' | sort -u | egrep -v '^(ttf-lucida|crafty-books-medium|crafty-books-small|festvox-rablpc8k|kxmame|funguloids|ltsp-controlaula|mplayer-nogui|ora2pg|python-pygpu|sdlmame|sdlmame-tools|linux-rt|e-uae|e-uae-dbg|sun-java5-fonts|sun-java6-fonts)$')
Since we want to minimize free packages, I added --no-install-recommends since it would only pull in free stuff (since I was already installing all of multiverse and partner directly). I tried to solve conflicts by making choices that would install the maximum number of packages. After installing 10G worth of packages, I had my results:
# vrms | grep ^[a-z0-9] | wc -l
514
# vrms | tail -n2
342 non-free packages, 15.2% of 2252 installed packages.
172 contrib packages, 7.6% of 2252 installed packages.
© 2009, Kees Cook. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.
You’re an inspiration to us all.
Comment by jorge — September 10, 2009 @ 7:42 pm
Wow, those results are pretty high. :P It’s interesting to see the results of your experiment and just how far you can go on the other end of the spectrum. Reading the Planet today piqued my curiosity, and surprisingly enough I came up with 0.3% non-free and 0.2% contrib score first run. Probably a result of force of habit in my install choices developed from my days of using Debian for years before I swithced over to Ubuntu (especially when they were a little more hard over on the “all free software” thing, which has started to loosen up a bit over the past few years).
Comment by John M — September 10, 2009 @ 11:16 pm
Nice one mate
Comment by Harsh — September 11, 2009 @ 2:33 am
That’s just apt though. Tons of non-packaged things you can install and raise it but it won’t be caught.
Comment by Vadi — September 11, 2009 @ 9:04 am