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Moving onMoving onPosted May 24, 2012 7:00 UTC (Thu) by djc (subscriber, #56880)Parent article: Moving on
Makes me wonder: what has changed over the years that distributions no longer fit on a CD? There's a lot of new stuff, to be sure, but isn't there also a lot of old stuff that we no longer need?
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Moving on Posted May 24, 2012 19:31 UTC (Thu) by jengelh (subscriber, #33263) [Link]
libc code bloat is one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nbv9L-WIu0s
Forced agglomeration is another. glibc-locale (openSUSE): ~117M. kernel: ~137M. libreoffice: ~219M, texlive: ~561M. Many of these can be combated with splitting packages. Yes, Debian gets it right (texlive is split, and locales are autogenerated in part), but unluckily, not everybody chose it.
Then, forced integration. Once upon a time, you could have a SUSE system without python (and without the then-nonexisting desktop/devel progs we take granted today). Now you need it for inkscape, llvm-clang, ibus, and whatever else. At the same time, perl use has not declined. I can already foresee that perl6 will find its way into systems without me even wanting it. Yes, Gentoo gets it right (can compile and deactivate), but unluckily, not everybody chose it.
Moving on Posted May 25, 2012 6:39 UTC (Fri) by djc (subscriber, #56880) [Link]
Yeah, this is one of the reasons I use Gentoo (although I don't use it for desktops, where compilation time might be a bigger issue). A Gentoo ISO is 154MB... but doesn't include any GUI, of course.
Still, there's a lot to be said for the granularity with which Gentoo lets you install packages and their features.
Moving on Posted May 30, 2012 12:08 UTC (Wed) by ssam (subscriber, #46587) [Link]
but a gentoo install takes up quite a bit of space, seen as you need to have a compiler and all the dev libraries. And portage takes up a fair about of space.
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