codergeek42

Just installed Fedora 8 yesterday and it's incredible. PulseAudio, simpler SELinux and firewall configuration, IcedTea Java stuff, CodecBuddy, to name but a few - simply amazing. Even the default background changes gradient depending on the time of day: from a blueish hue to a warm orange at nightfall. It's the little things like that which show the attention to detail and effort put into the distribution as a whole.

Absolutely outstanding. Sure, there's a minor EXA bug and some mono/multilib breakage...but then again, EXA is still deemed somewhat experimental by the X people, and multilib has always caused much pain; so I suppose these are to be expected.

A huge "Thank you!" to all the Fedora developers, infrastructure hackers, package maintainers, contributors, art/design people, translators - everyone. We've put out another fantastic release. :-D

So, for fun, I decided to check the size of the development/x86_64 repository for Fedora, and various subsets thereof. Using a spooky bit of awk-fu, I found that the total size of the repository is just slightly more than 30 gigabytes:

$ repoquery --info --all --repoid=development | grep Size \
| awk -F ':' --assign sum=0 '{sum=sum+$2} END {print sum}'
32517444423

(This printed amount is the total size, in bytes.) However, not all of this is x86_64 stuff. There is a large amount of arch-independent packages, too (deemed "noarch"). The 32-bit stuff is also divided into i386 and i686 packages (for libraries such as glibc and OpenSSL that intensively use more advanced processor features). The table below charts the approximate total size, in Mibibytes, of packages in the Fedora Development repository, grouped by architecture (x86_64, noarch, i386, and i686).

Architecture	Approx. Size (MiB)
x86_64	19844.48
noarch	6616.08
i386	4534.41
i686	16.08

This shows that much of the repo (nearly two-thirds) is purely 64-bit or arch-independent packages; and the remaining few gigabytes or so is duplicates of the 32-bit stuff needed for multilib. Mind you, that's more than half of the size of the 32-bit "Everything" repository. More than half of the packages' contents are duplicated to the 64-bit tree.

I didn't think so much of that would be 32-bit. I can understand things that absolutely need to stay 32-bit for various reasons (such as Wine), but we have so many application packages in Fedora that don't properly split their shared libraries/etc. into a subpackage for dependency minimization that we end up having to keep the entire application package so that its development files can use them properly, thus duplicating other aspects of the packages: data, runtime executables, et al. Plus, our current strategy of "anything with a -devel subpackage gets both arches" is horridly broken. We need a better heuristic for these things. Can we please endeavor to this fixed Fedora 9+? That would be so amazingly awesome!