Default image target size [Was:Re: Summary/Minutes from today's FESCo Meeting (2012-06-18)]

[Andre Robatino]

Kevin Kofler <kevin.kofler <at> chello.at> writes:

> Download times are not the only reason for not going up to the full
> (> 4 GiB) DVD size, though IMHO they are also a valid reason. There's also 
> the Multi Desktop Live DVD distributed by the ambassadors, which needs to 
> fit all the spins in both 32-bit and 64-bit versions on one dual-layer DVD. 
> So going up to 4 GiB per spin is a no go.

Would it be possible for QA to get access to the Multi Desktops before release
and test those directly against a media-determined hard limit? Also, I think the
limit for DVDs should be the media size, 4.7 GB, not 4 GiB. OpenSUSE for one has
released DVDs larger than 4 GiB for a while now and I haven't heard of problems.
Thumb drives are cheap, and if they need to be formatted with a non-FAT
filesystem to hold such images, that can be documented. And the size difference
between 4 GiB and 4.7 GB is about 9.4%, which is over 3 times the difference
between 700 MiB and 736970752 bytes* (assuming this latter size, approximately
702.83 MiB, is safe, which it may not be - there is at least one brand with a
slightly lower limit, for example see
http://www.berklix.com/~jhs/txt/cdroms.html , simply sticking to the advertised
size, 700 MiB, would avoid the real risk of releasing non-burnable images).

Also, while it's good to keep images small to reduce download time, that doesn't
need to be a hard limit either.

* See http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/test/2010-April/089943.html