We should trim the base system to be more container/embedded friendly

The problem

Our base system is too big: building containers on top of Debian ends up with huge containers even for trivial applications.

Actual situation

Current Debian docker images are more than 50Mb compressed for the normal variant, about 30Mb compressed for the slim variant. While it will never be possible to reach the size of alpine (3Mb compressed), we can do much better than this.

Expected situation

We trim down our base system to get rid of perl and other parts that are taking lots of space without adding any real value. We replace perl scripts with C applications, we move bash out of the essential set, etc.

We end up with a much smaller docker images and Debian becomes more popular to build containers thanks to its vast collection of packages.

This would also helps to reduce the footprint of Debian for VM/cloud servers, for embedded systems, etc.