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

[Douglas McClendon]

Jeroen van Meeuwen wrote:
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> Douglas McClendon wrote:
>> Jeroen van Meeuwen wrote:
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>>> 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 not true as anaconda needs the RPMs to install to a system,
>>> right? Last time I checked a LiveCD could not be installed "offline"
>>> because of this.
>> I think you really need to check again.  The current liveinst installer
>> (which uses the LiveCDCopy anaconda backend) does not need the rpms, it
>> just copies the ext3 filesystem image block for block from the livecd to
>> the disk.  i.e. all those threads in the past about the livecd installer
>> wiping the root partition, formatting the root partition twice, being
>> able to be sped up by 20+% with my turboLiveInst patch that jeremy is
>> afraid of, etc...
>>
> 
> Should the way liveinst installer installs to the user's system limit
> what space we can save on a LiveCD? I don't think so. Just like there's
> a use-case for installing from a LiveCD, there's a use case for "rm
> - -rf'ing" as much as one can to save space on the Live Media.

In my other reply, I pointed out that recovering rm-d things easily, is
not a hard problem to solve.  But certainly something that doesn't
currently work, and would require some new mechanism (either explicit on
the user's part, or just that yum will implicitly replace the missing
stuff the next time it has access to rpms that the missing stuff can be
extracted from).

Don't misunderstand me-  I have in no way suggested that there was 
anything wrong with your idea of removing things (spec documentation) 
that the livecd user might be perfectly willing to live without (until 
such time as they have access to the network to reinstall it, as 
mentioned above).


> 
> Does liveinst still support installing from RPMs as well?

/usr/(s)bin/liveinst is a bash wrapper around anaconda, that invokes
anaconda in a special way so that it uses the livecd filesystem
duplication method, instead of rpms.

The (perfectly normal) anaconda on the livecd, if invoked without the
liveinst wrapper, is capable of installing from a network or local
repository of rpms.  Though for obvious reasons, no local repository of
rpms has been included on the livecds.

-dmc