[Test-Announce] Fedora 19 Alpha Test Compose 2 (TC2) Available Now!

[John Reiser]

On 03/26/2013 07:10 AM, Bruno Wolff III wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 26, 2013 at 00:17:35 -0400,
>   Andre Robatino <robatino at fedoraproject.org> wrote:
>> *IMPORTANT*: All DVDs and Lives are oversized, so will not fit on the
>> standard media.

> Does anyone know the reason for this? I see this is likely breaking
> the nightly compose of the games spin as well.

Unless there is a specific, identified, and quantified expansion to complain about,
then the reason for increased size is "Progress".

Developers see that end users always request or expect more features
or better performance from individual packages.  It is rare that these
can be implemented _soon_ by using less code.

In the specific case of Fedora, there is some contribution from
always-present compressed [and subset] symbol tables that were added recently
(by Fedora policy) in order to facilitate finding and fixing bugs.

The use of xz/lzma for compression (instead of gzip/zlib) saved 15% to 30% in space
about a year and one-half ago.  Some spins soon expanded to use all available space.
[The time to complain was _then_.]

There are arguments that 1GB of flash memory on a USB stick
is a more important target than 700MB on a CD platter.

The daily rawhide report and Fedora 19 report now include size differences
for each package.  This helps detect large differences if people pay attention,
but "creeping kilobytes" often evade notice.

The workaround for "too big to fit on media" is to remove selected packages.

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