The current situation wrt distribution packages is that we have generally a package that drags in all dependencies for the CA and other optional components even when the admin does not want to do this.

This is due to the fact that historically we refrained from including package manger operation sin the install script to avoid making the code too platform specific.

However since the start we gained a platform specific abstraciotn layer. This gives us the opportunity to rethink a bit our startegy wrt package installation, specifically I think we should add a platform abstracted way to ask for certain pacages to be present and the platfrom specific code should translate components names to the platfrom specific package name and then proceed to invoke the distribution package manager to install any package that is missing.

For the dns case for exsample, instead of erroring out when the bind server is not instaled the platfrom abstraciont layer for, say, Fedora, would invoke yum install bind and have the package automatically installed if not present.

We could the apply the same mechanism to split the CA components in a sub package that encapsulates all the dependencies so that admins can install a CA-less replica withouth having to install dogtag and all the tomcat and java dependencies if they do not need them, yet as soon as they invoke ipa-ca-install the right dependencies would be automatically pulled in.