Live image / DVD package set merge

[Adam Williamson]

On Mon, 2013-12-16 at 09:08 -0600, Michael Catanzaro wrote:
> On Mon, 2013-12-16 at 08:58 -0500, Matthias Clasen wrote:
> > 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.
> 
> I don't think this is incompatible with your plans, it just requires
> doing the work of dropping stuff in comps instead of in the kickstart.
> Why not drop these unwanted packages from gnome-desktop in comps, and
> add them to a new group, say gnome-extra? Then the user installing via
> DVD can check that group if he knows to do so and wants the full set,
> but by default, he'll get the same (or near the same) result as he would
> have using the live CD.
> 
> What we're hoping to do is remove the arbitrary distinction between
> GNOME installed from the live CD and GNOME installed from the DVD. It'd
> be nice if the results were the same (or as close to the same as is
> politically possible -- hello rsyslog).
> 
> > Maybe the Fedora workstation product will change these plans, but even
> > then I don't think 'just make it bigger' is the right answer.
> 
> If you don't have enough space for evolution-help on the live CD, then I
> think that is sufficient justification to make it bigger.

We already gave up on CD size. For F20 we targeted 1GB (power-of-ten
bytes), and it's pared _to the bone_ to make that.

Matthias, I was going to say something similar to Michael: I can take
your point in theory, but in practice it's difficult to see how you can
possibly achieve the goal of a full GNOME environment in 1GB. Even with
all the potential change on the table with the fedora.next stuff, I
don't see that there's enough fat to cut to be able to say confidently
that we'll be able to deliver what we want as the coherent GNOME
experience inside of 1GB for the foreseeable future.

Look at the significant stuff that's cut from the current live:

%packages
# reduce the office suite in size
-planner
-libreoffice-xsltfilter
-libreoffice-pyuno
-libreoffice-emailmerge
-libreoffice-math

# remove some other applications
-gnome-boxes
-gnome-dictionary

# Dictionaries are big
# we're going to try keeping hunspell-* after notting, davidz, and ajax
voiced
# strong preference to giving it a go on #fedora-desktop.
# also see http://bugzilla.gnome.org/681084
-aspell-*
-man-pages*
-words

# Help and art and fonts can be big, too
-evolution-help
-desktop-backgrounds-basic
-*backgrounds-extras
-stix-fonts

# These things are cut purely for space reasons
-aisleriot
-brasero
-brasero-nautilus
-bijiben
-gnome-system-log
-deja-dup
-eog
-gnu-free-mono-fonts
-gnu-free-sans-fonts
-gnu-free-serif-fonts
-uboot-tools
-dtc

especially that last section, those are things the desktop team clearly
wants in the Proper Experience, as they're in the GNOME desktop comps
group (most of them). They're being cut "purely for space reasons". At
bare minimum, it seems like you'd somehow need to cut enough space from
the 'deliverable' (whatever it winds up being, with fedora.next) both to
get all those things back in, and to account for future bloat, or else
we'll be stuck on the 'try and find some space to save in a raging hurry
every milestone' train.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | XMPP: adamw AT happyassassin . net
http://www.happyassassin.net