Re: Fedora 32 system-wide change proposal: reduce installation media size by improving the compression ratio of SquashFS filesystem

[Kamil Paral <kparal@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, Jan 7, 2020 at 4:21 PM Kevin Kofler <kevin.kofler@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Kamil Paral wrote:
> Well for the general user, everything is one-time. One download, one write
> to USB, one install. Saving a minute in one step and adding it to a
> different step doesn't really matter, it's the same sum overall (unless
> you pay considerable money for the extra downloaded data, of course).

But the larger download will take several minutes extra even on a low-end
"broadband" connection. On slower connections, which are still standard in
parts of the world, it will take hours longer.

Sorry, but your argument is just wrong. We've had a similar discussion regarding RPM payload compression and so we know we're talking about small percent number increase by changing the compression, if any. That means a few tens of MBs for e.g. the Workstation image. And if you spend hours to download the extra 50 MBs, that means you're on a dial-up connection and the whole image would take you a week to download. This whole example is simply unrealistic. Anyone who has a problem to download extra 50-100 MBs can hardly use Fedora at all, because even the first dnf metadata update will consume exactly this amount of data, and then they will be presented with 1 GB worth of system updates.

Not to mention we're talking here about removing the nested ext4 filesystem, which is likely to reduce the image size (and combined with changing the compression type can equal out to no change at all).

It makes no sense to pre-emptively hate the discussed changes. Let's try them and then discuss the cost/benefit of the output with actual numbers in hand.

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