More LiveCD space optimizations

[Louis Simard]

2010-10-07 16:29 GMT Martin Owens <doctormo at gmail.com>:
> On Fri, 2010-10-08 at 00:07 +0800, John McCabe-Dansted wrote:
>> Strangely, even running advzip -z -0
>> images_human.zip shrinks it by 3%, and even shrinks the corresponding
>> images_human.zip.gz file
>
> That's not strange, that's just entropic packing principles. You've got
> a bunch of assumptions that can be made about data and a bunch of
> compression iterations, each make assumptions about the nature of the
> data and some are fitting together better.
>
> I'm keen on this work since saving space allows for all sorts of
> goodies. Did we save space with any of the SVG cleaning or did that need
> to be brought up to the packaging level?
>
> Martin,
>
>

Back in May, the preliminary testing I did on the LiveCD's .svg files
resulted in the finding that using Scour on them saved about 7 MB [1].
Of course, not only the LiveCD's packages use .svg files, and it would
be important to get that to other packages as well, for download
times/bandwidth use, if for any other reason. Perhaps rendering speed
would increase too, in SVG's case, but the other file formats
discussed in this thread have different characteristics.

So it needed to be brought up at the packaging level [1]. Scour will
probably itself need to be packaged too, to be included as
build-depends for packages that have SVG files (which is a lot of
application packages, since most have an SVG icon) to work well with
'apt-get source'.

[1] https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel-discuss/2010-May/011505.html