PROPOSAL: Core size reduction "bug day"

[Alexandre Oliva]

On Jul 23, 2004, David Nielsen <dnielsen at breakmygentoo.net> wrote:

> As everyone probably knows a few days ago a suggestion was brought up
> that we start moving none essential stuff like KDE, XFce and a lot of
> the other duplication into Extras in order to reduce the size of Core.

Personally, I think this Core/Extras thing is a mistake.  Pushing
packages to Extras won't make them any less of a maintenance burden,
and the inability to download a set of CDs and do a full install at
the time Core is released renders them bandwidth-expensive (no
bittorrent for them) or unusable (need for broadband).


I'd rather go for Core/Components.

Core would be close enough to a minimal install; maybe with the
addition of X for rhgb, firstboot and system-config-packages.
Everything else would be component CDs, that the installer would be
able to read from and install along with the Core, and that the user
could choose whether to download and have available for installation.

So we'd have a component for Gnome, a component for KDE, for OOo, for
development tools, for server packages, etc.  Components would be
files containing a filesystem image, a tarball, whatever, containing
the packages, plus package meta-information.  One could download such
components and burn them to CDs however they like.  The installer
would be able to look for such packages in any of the existing
install methods, and offer to install packages in them.

The nice thing with this arrangement is that components would have
names that people could easily choose whether to download, and they
could burn them into CDs however they like.  The downside is that the
installer gets more complex, and it may have to go through all
available media twice; once before the package selections, once for
the actual installation.

-- 
Alexandre Oliva             http://www.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva/
Red Hat Compiler Engineer   aoliva@{redhat.com, gcc.gnu.org}
Free Software Evangelist  oliva@{lsd.ic.unicamp.br, gnu.org}