Size of official media handouts (was Re: Proposed F18 feature: MiniDebugInfo)

[Adam Williamson]

On Mon, 2012-05-14 at 14:50 -0400, Adam Jackson wrote:
> On Mon, 2012-05-14 at 13:48 -0400, Bill Nottingham wrote:
> 
> > I'm still a bit baffled that a 3.5 MB increase on a 700MB live image
> > is considered a complete showstopper. That's one git package, for example;
> > I would hope that creative dependency trimming can find that space.
> > (Or reorganization of boot images, for example.)
> 
> There's a modest amount of low-hanging fruit if people really cared
> about image size.  For example, here's a way to shrink the
> (uncompressed) live filesystem by 30M:
> 
> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=812975#c4
> 
> I do find the concern for difficult install scenarios to be noble, but I
> would tend to class that as a different problem from producing a useful
> live image that also happens to be installable.  But clearly the
> objection here is about "doing more work" more than "changing the image
> size".

Well, the desktop team has said for a while that the thing they'd really
want to add to the desktop image if they had more room is LibreOffice,
but that requires substantially more than a few dozen MB. Basically,
they consider saving a small amount of room to be more trouble than it's
worth in most cases, but saving or creating a large amount of room to be
very valuable, as it would allow the re-introduction of an office suite.
AIUI, anyway. As it stands, the desktop image is actually usually
several MB under 700, but not enough to put LO back in.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | identi.ca: adamwfedora
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