[Fedora-livecd-list] Re: patch review and move of livecd scm

[David Zeuthen]

On Thu, 2007-03-08 at 12:15 -0500, Jesse Keating wrote:
> On Thursday 08 March 2007 12:08:16 David Zeuthen wrote:
> > So I don't really think that the lack of secondary-arch rpms on the live
> > cd (no 32-bit packages for x86_64, (almost no) 64-bit packages on ppc64)
> > is going to create this horror picture where things are dramatically
> > different as long as our repos still contain the secondary-arch packages
> > and our tools, e.g. yum and pirut and whatever, is capable of pulling in
> > the deps. Besides, the live CD already differs from the installed set;
> > there's no OO.o to start with for instance.
> 
> It's not about the package count, it's about the capability.  You're removing 
> the capability for an x86_64 live CD to run 32bit software.  That is a 
> feature we are quite proud of for Fedora.  

Sigh... Why didn't you just say so in the first place instead of coming
up with broken reasons like running software from NFS (on the livecd
even!) and the like? I still think it's really silly but, yeah,
sometimes we do inconvenience the user to show of features.

> We spent a lot of time and effort 
> to make it work a best we could, when other distributions decided to just 
> pass on it.  Removing this functionality from something we'll want to be able 
> to use to show off our features seems like a bad decision to me.  The damned 
> constraint of 700megs is what kills us time and time again, and it will only 
> get worse.

We also include a lot of useless crap due to packaging bugs like

 https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=229442

and also a ton of duplicate artwork etc. When I worked on OLPC we
managed to fix some of this, including silly dependencies like the X
server pulling in perl. I'm fearing it's slowly creeping in again:

 https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=230056

I guess keeping bloat to a minimum is not fashionable these days and to
some people "more packages == better product". Sad.

Here's a constructive idea: perhaps someone should investigate the price
difference on the cost of creating DVD media vs. CD media. To me it
sounds like you think it's zero. I haven't checked for a while though;
perhaps Greg knows as he is getting media prepared? 

Then, there's also the bandwidth issues; the more we include on the
livecd (which will get installed), the more updates our users will have
to download and in some regions bandwidth is extremely scarce.

>   The functionality of our LiveCD will only get worse over time if 
> we stick to CD size.  Perhaps we do only DVD live images for multiarch 
> platforms.  The tool set should still allow for creating a single arch x86_64 
> CD, but that isn't something I want to publish as any sort of official Fedora 
> release.

Well, I can hear it's certainly not my call so I'll just be quiet.

     David