FC4 slimfast slimfest

[Alexandre Oliva]

On Feb 21, 2005, Elliot Lee <sopwith at redhat.com> wrote:

> On Mon, 21 Feb 2005, [ISO-8859-1] Gérard Milmeister wrote:
>> On Mon, 2005-02-21 at 13:54 -0700, Joshua Eichorn wrote:
>> > Elliot Lee wrote:

>> > >Here's a heads up that we need to get rid of about 300M of packages to
>> > >make sure that FC4 continues to fit on 4 CD's.

>> Why limit FC4 to 4 CD's? Is it out fear that someone will cry "bloat"?

> If we add another CD:
> 	The companies that create CD sets for magazines or resale will see 
> 	their media costs go up by 25%.

How about 1 DVD?  The binaries for FC1 up to FC3 fit in that, and I
very much doubt FC4's wouldn't.  CDs are *so* small...

People didn't have so much trouble installing GNU/Linux distros from
40+ floppies before I started playing with GNU/Linux myself.  Why are
4 or 5 CDs such a big deal?

> 	The mirror sites with limited bandwidth and disk space will be 
> 	likely to stop mirroring Fedora Core.

If they didn't have trouble mirroring the FC2 DVD images, that include
SRPMS, or even mirroring the FC2 i386 and x86_64 CD and DVD isos,
with a total of 4 copies of every SRPM (not counting the exploded RPMS
and SRPMS trees), why would they have trouble with an additional GiB
or so now that we don't include the SRPMS in the DVD images any more?

> Which means removing things from Core so we can put them in Extras...

How about moving Gnome and KDE to extras?  That would save a lot of
space.  Then the same clueless users that would be driven away by the
additional half-CD would think: hey, cool, this distro is a single CD
(or maybe two), why not give it a try?

-- 
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}