[tex-live] heresy

[Sebastian Rahtz]

I want to define a really mininal TeX setup. You know what that means, 
just the pdftex engine, metapost, Type1 fonts only, etc.
My current "minimal" setup clocks in at 96 megabytes, which is ridiculous!

I wonder what people feel about breaking the "cm" package in two, so 
that the Metafont sources
are a separate package (which I can omit)? would that cause howls of 
protest? or shall I not have "cm"
at all, and just have "lmodern"?

Realistically, are .afm files ever used these days by normal users? I 
mean the .afm files
for cm, lmodern etc

Fabrice, all the packages like lib-png and lib-zlib, are they used by 
pdftex?

Sebastian

PS why do I want this? because I maintain a Knoppix customization. I'd 
quite like a basic
TeX on there (it's been banished from the normal Knoppix), but I have 
very little space to spare.