[Design-team] Space for wallpapers in Fedora 16

Kevin Kofler kevin.kofler at chello.at
Sat Jun 11 00:25:49 UTC 2011


Elad wrote:
> Why don't you try to cut down on some useless software instead?

We are already removing everything that's truly useless.

> a lot of un-needed software is installed by default, eg. sendmail. you
> could simply don't install sendmail by default and save 1.5MB!

Sendmail is not entirely useless:
* It's used to e-mail logs or other notifications to root's local mailbox 
(which can be read either by firing up KMail as root and configuring it for 
a local mailbox, or (better solution) by setting up an alias to forward the 
mail to a regular local user, firing up KMail as that user and configuring 
it for a local mailbox, which can coexist with one or more POP3 and/or IMAP 
mailboxes, by the way).
* It can be used by KMail to send mail without an SMTP server (which still 
does work in some environments, though you may get filtered by ISP outbound 
port blocking, residential IP blacklists etc.).
so these are at least 2 contexts in which sendmail together with KMail can 
be useful.

In addition, the relevant size for live image size constraints is the xz-
compressed size, not the uncompressed size. Since RPMs are compressed with 
the same technology (xz) as the live images, the package size is a good 
indicator. The sendmail package is only 683 KiB. Wallpapers, on the other 
hand, are already compressed (as PNGs or JPGs) and don't really compress any 
further. So, to compensate for 6 MiB of extra wallpapers, we would need to 
find 10 packages of the size of sendmail and sacrifice them, sendmail alone 
is hardly going to make a difference.

> And I'm sure there is more useless software you can remove to make some
> space for wallpapers and other *useful* software.

I'm not convinced. We already worked hard on trimming useless stuff, 
especially the one which really matters size-wise.

        Kevin Kofler



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