Exclude packages in kickstart file

Question

The Redhat kickstart documentation describes how to deselect/exclude packages in the packages section - i.e. one may put - in front of a package name to exclude it.

But it doesn't fully work in this example (when installing CentOS 7):

%packages
@^minimal
@core
-*firmware
-btrfs-progs
-chrony
-iprutils
-kexec-tools
-pinentry
-plymouth
-postfix
-teamd
-tuned
-wpa_supplicant
%end

Anaconda still installs some of the excluded packages, i.e.:

linux-firmware
pinentry
teamd
wpa_supplicant

Why aren't all excluded? How to I effectively include more of them?

Note that after the first reboot yum remove *firmware does select linux-firmware for removal without any dependencies.

Removal of the others would also remove some inverse-dependent packages - e.g. for teamd the NetworkManager-team package. The only dramatic one is pinentry, which is required by yum, and thus yum rightfully refuses to remove it.

Answer 1

if you want to have complete control of this, there's 3 flags relevant to this - they are listed behind %packages

• nocore
• nobase
• nodeps (?)

For you, the core group is the problem. But these mean what they mean, especially the third one. The system will then only install what you explicitly list in your %packages section. I've done this for industrial-style systems, and the process included using ldd on every executable binary to check for missing libs etc.

The sane path is to work from the full rpm list of an installed system, and to allow for deps to be installed.