[Fedora-livecd-list] Trimming the size of LiveCD's

[Douglas McClendon]

Jeroen van Meeuwen wrote:
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> Here's a thought:
> 
> 1304 random packages will install 724 MB of data in /usr/share/doc
> 
> I'm sure there is /something/ to gain here. If every package on average
> installs ~0.5 MB of docs... Would it worth figuring out what docs should
> be on the LiveCD in the first place? I guess removing everything RPM
> calls docs is too much, as this will include man-pages as well.
> 
> Any thoughts?

Setting asside the redundant fedora-devel changelog thread aspects of 
the discussion...

Back when I was squeezing mandrake-7.2 into a 130MB zisofs-d livecd, 
blindly nuking /usr/share/doc was one of the first things I did (in 
addition to nuking /var/lib/rpm)

But of course there are reasons to want at least parts of both of those 
things.

IMO, the idealistic unrealistic solution (the kind I love talking about 
the most), is to add a couple 'tunables' to the way rpm deals with stuff.

One tunable would be language support.  At the low end, just give me the 
default system language and any other languages I've told the system to 
support.  On the high end, give me all languages available.  In between, 
give me a sliding scale based on language popularity.

The next tunable, would be a generic size one.  On the low end, would be 
the minimal files needed for the minimal functionality of the package. 
On the high end would be every optional extra the package could possibly 
use.  In between again, a sliding scale based on popularity of optional 
component.

Then, you have a yum/rpm command, so that in one fell swoop, you can 
tweak these tunables for all packages in the system.  This would come in 
very handy if you ran into a situation where all of a sudden you needed 
to free up some disk space, or if all of a sudden you increased from a 
40G disk to a 400G disk.  (or if of course you are tuning a livecd 
install for minimal size)

Likewise, during installation, the installer could choose a reasonable 
setting based on the size of the destination volume.

$0.02...

-dmc