Live image / DVD package set merge

[Matthias Clasen]

On Sun, 2013-12-15 at 18:15 -0800, Adam Williamson wrote:
> Hi, folks. So as a quick test of the DVD / live package set stuff, I
> just built an F21 live image from fedora-live-desktop.ks - rather than
> fedora-livecd-desktop.ks .
> 
> Even with absolutely no tweaks or optimization, it comes out at the huge
> size of...1.2GB.
> 
> So I think it's entirely feasible to bump the size target to 2GB, drop
> fedora-livecd-desktop.ks entirely, and just build from
> fedora-live-desktop.ks, giving the live image the same package set as
> DVD. We wouldn't wind up with a crazy huge image or anything, and we'd
> have lots of space inside the size target and not have to worry about
> that problem.
> 
> There are certainly optimizations possible; if we did this, we could
> focus more on optimizing things in comps. One obvious one is the dep
> chain that pulls in perl. fedora-livecd-desktop.ks drops 'linux-atm'
> from the live image to prevent perl getting pulled in and save space. In
> comps, linux-atm comes in via the 'dial-up' group. So an obvious tweak
> there is to move 'dial-up' from being a default group for GNOME to being
> an optional group - this makes sense anyway, I think. People who still
> use dial-up or plug directly into a PPPoATM modem or something can
> select the group easily enough, everyone else doesn't get useless stuff.

Keep in mind that a lot of what you see in those kickstart files is
historic - I don't know if linux-atm still pulls in perl, or if
something else does by now.

> If any of the other package drops on the live image make sense to
> preserve for a larger live image and DVD install, we can look at how to
> implement them in comps (ideally).
> 
> If people are interested in this I can come up with a concrete proposal
> pretty fast, I think. Even with the whole three-product thing rolling
> along, I think it makes sense to do this, since it wouldn't be
> particularly difficult and would simplify things a lot; I think it's
> possible that the 3 product stuff gets pushed out to F22, and if that
> happens, it'd be nice not to have fuss about the size limit and
> differences between DVD and live installs for F21 testing.

This goes a bit against some of the long-term plans we have for the
desktop spin, which is to make it smaller, not bigger. One of the
reasons for working on gnome-software is that we need a user-friendly
way to install applications to get out of having to pre-install them
all.

Maybe the Fedora workstation product will change these plans, but even
then I don't think 'just make it bigger' is the right answer.