[sspiff]

Exactly this. I was thinking of making a similar comment but you made it far better than I could.

Number of binaries is kind of a meaningless metric, especially for a system that historically follows the UNIX philosphy of each program doing one thing.

Sure, a shell is complicated and a potential risk, and perhaps it's a good idea to exclude from the base system in this context.

But I'd rather have ls, tr and wc on my system than some bespoke, all-encompassing API service that has been far less battle tested providing similar functionality.

And like you rightly pointed out, these new binaries all contain their own list of dependencies which are pulled in at build time and need to be taken into scope as well.

That's not to say Talos or its approach doesn't hold merit, but I think it's a little disengenious to simply point at the number of binaries.

[JustinGarrison]

I agree number of binaries is an arbitrary metric but also an indicator that things work differently with Talos. You have to use the declarative API for management which some people could see as a bad thing.

I’d also like to point out that the system API is designed to be extendable and adaptable to different operating systems. We’d love for more vendors to create adapters/shims to get the benefits of API managed Linux

https://github.com/cosi-project/community