pruning the liveCD

[Jeremy Katz]

On Tue, 2007-02-20 at 18:12 -0500, David Zeuthen wrote:
> On Tue, 2007-02-20 at 17:50 -0500, Bill Nottingham wrote:
> > Unfortunately, the best way to clear out space that I can see
> > is switch to latin, indic, and cjk liveCDs. Which... yuk.
> 
> Yes, but we're most probably going to do this sooner or later anyway so
> might as well do it now? The savings are substantial IIRC and as a data
> point Mandriva is doing this already with Mandriva One. 

The cost is somewaht substantial too, though.  Instead of one live CD to
spin and test, you now have n.  You also have n*700 megs worth of ISOs
for mirrors to carry.  

> The hard part is deciding what regions to target; you have to take into
> account
>  - translations
>  - input methods
>  - fonts (though I'm firmly in the camp that even a US english install
>           needs to have good enough font coverage to such that e.g. 
>           http://www.yahoo.co.jp/index.html isn't a Pango-block fest)
>  - other things I can't remember right now

FWIW, fonts are about 135 megs currently while translations are between
4 and 8 megs a language for a total of 32 megs.  The other big kicker
space-wise for language support (that we're not currently doing) is
dictionaries.  

Have I mentioned that the space constraints of CDs are bothersome
yet? ;-)  

The questions really just come down to which compromises we want to
make.  Well, that or we need to come up with magically better
compression :)

Jeremy