Debian OS packages truly needed

[alfredo-rico]

Hi 👋
For a Debian/Ubuntu OS I've read a post saying that the packages needed for ruby-vips (to be used in rails project) are:

sudo apt install libvips42 libvips-dev libvips-tools 

But do we really need all of them? I'd like to confirm if just installing libvips42 is good enough. My rails project doesn't need shell scripting and ruby-vips has been already installed as a dependency. So no gem compilation needed I think.

Thanks

[jcupitt]

Hello @alfredo-rico,

Yes, just:

sudo apt install libvips42 --no-install-recommends

The --no-install-recommends makes it usefully smaller again:

$ docker run --rm -it ubuntu:24.04
root@62a2ae7f9b8c:/# apt update && apt upgrade
...
root@62a2ae7f9b8c:/# apt install libvips42 --no-install-recommends
Reading package lists... Done
...
After this operation, 132 MB of additional disk space will be used.
...

You can make it smaller still if you build your own libvips binary.

I would also look at the checklist here:

https://github.com/libvips/libvips/blob/master/doc/Developer-checklist.md

Particularly:

https://github.com/libvips/libvips/blob/master/doc/Developer-checklist.md#only-enable-the-load-libraries-you-need