Alexander E. Patrakov wrote:
yesterday on IRC Jeremy Huntwork expressed is concerns about the CD
size. Indeed, the 6.2-pre2 CD is 454 MB in size. The following will
help reducing the CD size:
Yeah, I am also a bit concerned about that, but in able to support and
have documentation for many languages, it is inevitable.
1) Removal of all bitmap fonts and replacing of Arphic fonts with
FireFly: already done together with the X11R7 transition.
This results in a 439 MB CD. I expected better results, but we added
many new video drivers.
Sounds good. Still an improvement.
2) Removal of server components of SAMBA: already done, although they
proved to be useful for me personally when I used this CD for
retrieving data from a crashed Windows 2000 Server installation.
This results in a 425 MB CD.
It was useful for you because you needed to run a temporary samba
server? Or for other reasons? I do use the CD to mount a smb volume
sometimes, and I think that functionality should stay. Not sure about
having the samba server also.
3) Dropping DRI/OpenGL/xvideo support. I don't want to drop it now,
because if we do a pre-release the LiveCD soon, it would highlight the
problems that the BLFS book will see (via xlockmore/xscreensaver). I
do think that such binary-only releases generate more useful bug
reports because people who can easily circumvent their problem by
silently deviating from the book instructions no longer have this
chance with binary-only releases. Also, this currently serves as a
X11R7 hint to BLFS book developers.
Of course, this eye candy will be removed before the final release,
and this will subtract at least 11 MB from the CD size.
Not sure about all this stuff. Will have to get more familiar with Xorg
7 anyways.
4) Dropping Composite, Damage and Fixes support: the Fixes extension
is used by default by GTK+ as installed on the CD. Composite could be
used by XFCE if we pass the --enable-compositor option to xfwm.
Estimated space savings are below 1 MB.
If it has a useful function, might as well keep it. 1MB isn't going to
break me. ;)
5) Dropping static libraries in /usr/lib, except for libc*.a: total 30
MB, that gives approximately 10 MB of the CD size.
If they aren't needed and LFS builds as expected from it, might as well.
6) Dropping support for Asian languages: huge font files, and the
whole family of SCIM packages. This is going to drop 80 MB off the CD
size, but I think we have some users there, and previous releases of
the CD included the (now obsolete) zhcon package. Anyway, libchewing
and scim-chewing packages are optional, and scim-input-pad is even
less needed (to use it, right click the keyboard icon in the upper
right corner. It allows easy input of strange characters like math
operators, currency symbols, dingbats and so on).
Yeah, I know this adds a lot of packages and big files, but it is
worthwhile to inclcude it. So my opinion is to keep it.
Justin
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