Hi,
anonym wrote (06 Jan 2011 15:36:49 GMT) :
> If we're already approaching the 700 MB limit, perhaps we should
> look into a lighter DE than Gnome?
I'd rather not to, for several reasons:
1. Probably thanks to Ubuntu's popularity, lots of users are somehow
used to GNOME and would need to re-learn non neglictible amounts of
practical knowledge.
2. My intuition tells me GNOME offers us a great bunch of useful
functionality; I fear we would slowly realize this (and need to fix it
bits after bits) if we switch to something lighter, everytime users
complain for disappeared functionality. On the other hand I must admit
I have not tried e.g. XFCE recently, and it might now have most of
GNOME features we care about. I would be happy to stand corrected on
this one.
3. This seems like a very radical change, with important consequences
both on usability and developement resources. I am not sure it would
be worth it since:
- we are currently only slightly above 700MB => we probably can
manage to workaround this issue for the lifetime of Debian Squeeze
without coping with such a big change
- when Debian Squeeze+1 = Wheezy is published (statistically: ~1st
quarter 2013), bundled software size is likely to have increased
again, and even using a lighter DE will probably not bring images
size back under 700MB
- when Wheezy is published, we might be in a position to reasonnably
target DVD and USB rather than CD.
> 1. Let's clear out /var/lib/apt/lists (except the sub-dir called
> "partial", which can be left empty). That's 60 MB in T(A)ILS 0.6.1.
This seemed like the lower hanging fruit => done in devel branch.
> That makes it annoying to install new software though since one has
> to "apt-get update" before.
Yep. It will mostly annoy... ourselves I guess. I very frequently need
to do so while developing T(A)ILS.
> If we choose to do this, perhaps this directory is another candidate
> for being persistent once that has been implemented?
Sure.
> 2. One thing I cleared in Incognito for additional space was
> /usr/share/doc, which in T(A)ILS 0.6.1 amounts to another 66 MB. One
> possible legal problem with this is that licenses usually reside there,
> and I guess most licenses require them to be shipped with any binary
> distribution. Parhaps we could have a script which re-names them
> appropriately and puts them in a licences subdir? E.g.
> /usr/share/doc/tor/copyright --> /usr/share/doc/licences/tor-copyright, etc.
I'd like to go on shipping documentation (other than manpages) for the
bundled software, for usability reasons. Why not, if we have no better
choice... but it seems Alan suggested less drastic ways to lower
images size. We'll see.
> I suppose that translates to about half when compression is taken
> into account.
The average compression ratio (rootfs -> squashfs) is rather 1:3.
> Also, there must be several packages of the 900 installed packages
> (that's in 0.6.1) we can clear out...
Probably.
Bye,
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