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

[Douglas McClendon]

Tim Lauridsen wrote:
> 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?
>>
>>   
> I think it is a bad idea, because many people uses the Live CD's to 
> install to their systems, and then they end up with a system
> without doc files, with no easy way to get the docs back on the systems.

That's really not such a hard thing to fix - the easy way to get things 
back after installation.

It also relates to a feature I proposed a long time ago

"yum spininstall"

Which would be an easy way to take a livecd installed system, and 
presuming online access to good yum repos, trivially upgrade with one 
command to the type of default system that you would have gotten if you 
had installed from DVD instead of CD.

I.e. I was really peeved that the man-pages rpm did not get installed 
(amonst many other subtle choices made in the name of space fitting). 
But I didn't want to waste time finding out the specific things I really 
wanted, when really I just wanted a "normal system" as defined by the 
choices made for the defaults selected on the non-space-constrained DVD 
spin.

My theory was that you could take the package selections of the spins, 
wrap them in groups, such that with a single yum command, after 
installing from livecd, you could get all the packages that would have 
been installed from the traditional DVD spin.

Likewise, if you got an itch to do ASIC design, and you had just 
installed the normal fedora desktop livecd spin, then you could do 
something like "yum spininstall FedoraElectronicLab".  (spininstall is 
just a random illustration, it could easily enough be wrapped into the 
existing groupinstall command).

</steps off of soapbox for the evening>

-dmc