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

[Jeremy Katz]

On Fri, 2007-08-31 at 10:24 +0200, Jeroen van Meeuwen wrote:
> 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?

If the live images weren't installable?  Sure.  Since they are, though,
you're trading off a little space in the short-term[1] for hurting every
user in the long-term.  Because they a) won't have the docs if they want
them b) won't be able to use deltarpms[2] c) make the system look hacked
by rpm -V not working, ...

It's really just not a good idea for the official images.  That said,
anyone who wants to for their own unofficial live images that they build
for whatever reason is more than welcome to have "rm
-rf /usr/share/doc/*"[3] in their %post.

The _better_ thing to do is to actually look at what's being installed
as docs and then figure out some improved packaging policy and see about
not shipping some of it.  eg, I'm not sure it makes sense to ship the
ChangeLogs in general, either for the live CD or a regular system.  But
I suspect that to be somewhat controversial.

Jeremy

[1] It was about 10 megs for the end live image the last time I looked.
Which in the scheme of things isn't that much
[2] Because the packages will no longer be intact, you can't recreate
the new package and do a verify.  This will really hurt
[3] Note that you need to be a little bit more careful as this will
remove the default firefox page