OLPC & package dependency growth

[Daniel Drake]

Hi,

I'm working on OS-level issues at OLPC. I saw Greg Dekoenigsberg's mail
about Fedora/OLPC collaboration (thanks Greg!) and have another point to
raise:

We're currently working on upgrading from F7 to F9 for our next major
software release. One of the challenges here is that by upgrading, over
100 packages were added to the build as dependencies of packages we were
already including.

Examples: totem-gstreamer now depends on gvfs which pulls in samba. 
HAL now pulls in smbios-utils (entirely Dell-specific hence not relevant
here)
perl and associated packages are now pulled in by mtd-utils, ntp,
gstreamer-plugins-base and libbonobo
libgnome now depends on fedora-gnome-theme which pulls in a lot more
theme stuff
...

The XO has just 1GB flash so we need to keep the size of our build
down.

I guess some of these extra dependency chains are hard to predict/avoid
but it would be good to raise awareness here. It would also be great if
people could help us slim our F9 builds back to acceptable sizes, since
we are nearing release-candidate phase.

Some related links:
http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/7353
http://dev.laptop.org/~bert/update.1-joyride.html - the top section
shows all the packages added in joyride (F9) over update1 (F7)
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Distro_Version_Migration_Nastiness (we're
forking some packages into the OLPC-3 disttag which have slimmed down
dependencies, but obviously forking is not a great option)
http://ausil.us/blog/olpc-fedora.html

Thanks,
Daniel