F-13-Beta Live images are > 700Mib

[Donald Buchan]

> o Have two images
>   - Advantages:
>     * If you have a USB key, the experience is improved since it
> includes OpenOffice.
>   - Disadvantages:
>     * Website is more confusing
>     * Space/QA concerns
>   - Engineering time could be spent on:
>     * Website?
> 
> o Go back to 700MB image
>   - Advantages:
>     * Was previous status quo, is well understood
>     * Honestly, it's a question in my mind for how many people it's
> too onerous to download OpenOffice after they install if they actually
> use it
>   - Disadvantages:
>     * Not quite the full experience, and has the drawback of the
> removal of bits like NFS
>   - Engineering time could be spent on:
>     * Adding some code to install @gnome-desktop @office afterwards
> via e.g. PackageKit UI
>     * Adding "stub" .desktop files to image which install OpenOffice on demand
> 
> o Only use ~1G image
>   - Advantages:
>     * No website confusion
>     * It's pretty complete, includes OpenOffice and NFS for example
>   - Disadvantages:
>     * We haven't shipped a 1G image before and the risks are not well quantified
>     * If someone wants a CD, then they'd be fairly confused why the
> desktop looks really different and ships a different web browser, etc.

Newbie to list.

I can only say what I think you all already know:

Last week I downloaded the F12 live CD and the Ubuntu 9.12 Live CD.

I didn't pass on the F12 live CD.  As a marketing tool for the desktop,
the F12 CD is very vanilla and doesn't much show off Fedora on the
desktop.

Knowing what Fedora can do for me and I what I can do on the desktop
with it, and what it entails to set up via a traditional install, I
think that with the current Live CD people would either be totally
unimpressed and move on to the competition, or go through all the usual
growing pains to get it work and wonder why they bothered with the Live
CD (in its current state) in the first place.  And that's being polite.

I think that the "1 gig" (see below) live image needs to be a showcase
"of some sort", just as Fedora itself is a showcase of the newest free
software.  I would suggest that it's the desktop that needs to be
showcased, but that's just me; however, Fedora being a general purpose
distro, it could, due to image size constraints, have two or three
images (ie. desktop, server, multimedia, etc.).

Obviously the key here, from this past week's discussions, is to
consider accessibility (ie. a "1 gig" USB key, whatever its true size in
bytes may be, is a fairly accessible thing these days, and DVDs).  The
minimum size should probably be some lowest common denominator, ie. 1000
x 1000 x 1000 (as opposed to 1024 x 1024 x 1024), after which it likely
should be just a live image of a relatively full set distro on a DVD
image.

Ultimately, to avoid confusion, the "relatively full install on a live
DVD" (or whatever image decided upon, that would only be hindered by the
size of the DVD) might be the least confusing and avoid having too many
subgroups dividing up the engineering talent in order to make multiple
live images.  The move to a larger minimum size appears to implicitly
meant to do exactly that, instead of having a bunch of sub-groups trying
to squeeze out every package irrelevant to their sub-group's goal in
order to produce 31 flavours, each of which would fit on a CD but which
might only showcase how to do email on one, web browsing on another,
etc., and not really give Fedora as a whole a good review.

My CAD $0.02.