Steve, you're right.  My image.bb is adding various lmsensors packages to the IMAGE_INSTALL, some of which depend on perl-modules.   perl-modules seems to be the big monster, not perl.  We need lmsensors.  So I guess my question is really, how can I (or can I at all) reduce the footprint of perl-modules?  perl-modules doesn't have any Depends, rather it has a long list (~ 670) of Recommends. 

On Tue, Mar 2, 2021 at 1:49 PM Richard Purdie <richard.purdie@linuxfoundation.org> wrote:
On Tue, 2021-03-02 at 20:42 +0000, Diego Santa Cruz via lists.yoctoproject.org wrote:
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: yocto@lists.yoctoproject.org <yocto@lists.yoctoproject.org> On
> > Behalf Of Steve Sakoman via lists.yoctoproject.org
> > Sent: 02 March 2021 21:06
> > To: Steve Sakoman <steve@sakoman.com>
> > Cc: rustyhowell@gmail.com; Yocto (yocto@lists.yoctoproject.org)
> > <yocto@lists.yoctoproject.org>
> > Subject: Re: [yocto] Reducing the perl footprint on my image
> >
> > On Tue, Mar 2, 2021 at 10:01 AM Steve Sakoman via
> > lists.yoctoproject.org <steve=sakoman.com@lists.yoctoproject.org>
> > wrote:
> > >
> > > On Tue, Mar 2, 2021 at 6:26 AM <rustyhowell@gmail.com> wrote:
> > > >
> > > > I have an image that is using debian package management
> > (PACKAGE_CLASSES = "package_deb").  Because apt and dpkg require perl,
> > perl is being installed in the image.   No problem.  Except that the entire perl
> > stack is 669 packages.
> > >
> > > I just took a look at the manifest for one of my images that includes
> > > PACKAGE_CLASSES = "package_deb".  I see the perl package plus 43
> > > perl-module packages.  Are you sure that something else in your images
> > > isn't pulling in all of those other perl-module packages?
> >
> > It just occurred to me to make sure you are looking in the image
> > manifest to see which packages are actually installed in your image.
> > The perl recipe does generate 676 packages (in dunfell) so perhaps you
> > might be looking at the generated packages rather than the installed
> > packages??
> >
>
> I encountered a similar problem with package management enabled and rpm 
> as package format, where I also just install rpm for package management 
> and not all dnf stack. I get quite a lot of perl and python packages 
> into the image which are pulled by the rpm package, but they are only
> needed for things like rpm-build, rpm-sign, etc., not for the bare 
> rpm command, which is the only one I need in the image.
>
> So I locally extended the rpm recipe to split those tools into rpm-build, 
> rpm-sign and rpm-archive and skip those packages in the image. I should 
> probably send patches for that to oe-core. Is that something that could
> be accepted?

Not sure they need to go to separate packages but moving those 
three to some kind of "build" package would make a lot of sense
to me at least.

Cheers,

Richard