Why 415 is bloated

Ttuuxxx commented that the 414/415 live-CD is 101MB, which is quite a jumpy from the official released 4.1.2 iso which is 95MB. Of course there are lots of package upgrades, and I added some packages, such as extra audio libraries (flac, speex), and that brought the iso file up to around 97-98MB. However just recently I threw lots of extra files into the 'xorg_xorg_servers' package (extra drivers plus some support files) and added heaps of extra modules for the 2.6.25.16 kernel (provided by rerwin and tempestuous) and that has blown it out to 101MB.

To quantify, here are the compressed package sizes before and after my recent splurge:

xorg_xorg_servers-73 1.42MB 2.24MB
linux_kernel-2.6.25.16 24.17MB 24.80MB

So, the total increase attributed to these two is 1.45MB.

I will revisit that Xorg package and take out some of those support files that I had put in. I didn't know whether the extra drivers needed them -- well, I'll assume they don't. Testers will soon pick up something wrong in the error log if a driver won't load.

The kernel package is massive. For 516 I think that I will build the live-CD with a separate 'zdrv'. In cases where the 'pup4-416.sfs' main Puppy SFS file copies into RAM, this is going to reduce the footprint in RAM considerably.

---

Comments

Pbloat
Username: dogone
Keeping Puppy under 100MB is laudable, but I wouldn't sacrifice any key features in the process. Puppy should remain close to the magic number, but if another meg or three buys real value for the user, I say go for it.

415
Username: ttuuxxx
"Hi Barry a lot of the Libs in 415 weren't stripped, that alon would bring it under 100MB, /usr/lib/libgtk-x11-2.0.so.0.1400.7 reduces over 700kb smaller if its stripped. I'll edit the sfs later and strip them all :) ttuuxxx

pCD
Username: 01micko
"Hello Barry 100 is just a number. Apps get bigger, fixes add size, a few meg is forgivable. pCD, a cd player by zigbert works well on older kit as well as new. http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=41883 3kb. Don't know if you missed it. There is no simpler cd player for puppy. Necessary IMHO.

100MB is just a number
Username: ICPUG
"Maybe, but perhaps it should be a requirement. Once you allow 101 then 105 becomes acceptable and then 110 and then ... The 100MB affects all sorts of things - download time, bootup time, amount of RAM required to runin RAM, ratio of tight code to sloppy code in particular. The unique selling point of Puppy is what it can do in 100MB. When it is impossible to fit the essential requirements into 100MB we may have to consider an increase. However, 'it is just a number' is no justification.

flac
Username: zigbert
"Which apps depends on the flac lib. I wonder because 'ldd ffmpeg' doesn't show flac as a dependency. If that's true it should be doable to write a ripper without flac (216kb), cdparanoia (43kb) and maybe libcddb (31kb). Pmusic and Pburn supports *.flac via ffmpeg. Sigmund

Re: Flac
Username: BarryK
"Ffmpeg normally uses external shared libraries where possible. Probably when ffmpeg was compiled, there was no libflac available so it used it's internal flac library. Ripoff and Asunder use libflac. If I recompile ffmpeg it too will probably use libflac. ...I'll have to check that out.

Re: flac
Username: zigbert
"I'll put the mini-dependent ripper on hold, and wait for your decision....

Tags: woof