F14-build size

[Yioryos Asprobounitis]

--- On Wed, 5/25/11, Peter Robinson <pbrobinson at gmail.com> wrote:

> From: Peter Robinson <pbrobinson at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: F14-build size
> To: "Yioryos Asprobounitis" <mavrothal at yahoo.com>
> Cc: "OLPC Devel" <devel at lists.laptop.org>
> Date: Wednesday, May 25, 2011, 4:06 AM
> On Wed, May 25, 2011 at 8:50 AM,
> Yioryos Asprobounitis
> <mavrothal at yahoo.com>
> wrote:
> > There is some discussion about the usability of F14
> builds in relation to their size [1]
> > F14 builds are _really big_ for the 1GB XO-1 NAND
> leaving very little space for the user. If a few videos or
> wiki is installed or even try olpc-update you may run out of
> space.
> >
> > I was wondering if unused locales could be removed (a
> la localepurge) at first boot or after language selection,
> modifying also accordingly `%_install_langs'.
> > This should save considerable space and make F14
> builds more usable for the 1 million XO-1s out there.
> > Of course deployments could make heir own builds and
> modify them accordingly, but I'm sure that many places may
> not have this luxury.
> >
> > I understand that we are in a feature freeze, but this
> could certainly be considered a bug, and a major one.
> > Otherwise I think it certainly merits some
> consideration for 11.2.1
> 
> Its a known issue that is being worked upon, IMO its more
> likely to
> hit 11.3.0. Its partially a dependency bloat which needs to
> be worked
> upon upstream.

The dependency bloat is certainly _the_ issue. 
But I would think that besides locales mentioned before, things like /lib/firmware/* (but usb8388.bin) and /usr/lib/dri/* could be removed from XO-1 images, without any problem.
Between firmware, dri and additional locales, the available space could be increase by almost 50% _today_.
This could even be done at first boot with a small additional script, so no major changes in os builder would be needed.

> 
> Peter
>