dCore size?

[theYinYeti]

Hey Jason W! The more roberts and you talk about dCore, the more interested I get :-)
I have a question not related to your “alpha1” post, so I thought I should post it in a new topic; here it is:

Considering a Core installation with a broad range of day-to-day applications, ilke: Firefox, Thunderbird, Gimp, Geany (an editor), LibreOffice, gftp2, keepassx, wine, wpa-gui, EyeOfGnome, Evince, File-roller, ROX-Filer, Mplayer, Cups & drivers, samba3, urxvt, screen, and gparted;
Would you say that the equivalent dCore installation is expected to be the same size, or bigger? In the latter case, any idea how much?

[Jason W]

Hi theYinYeti,
Here is what I have observed.  When creating individual SCEs out of your favorite packages, the size is substantially larger.  But when working from a file list, I have found that the larger your collection of apps in that list the more similar in size to standard TC your SCE file becomes.  Since Debian does include many Xorg libs for things like GTK2 that standard TC repo does not, individual imported packages are going to be larger each then a similar instance of installing a package and it's deps as TCZs.  But by the time you have Xorg, XFCE, LXDE, large QT and GTK2 media players, file managers, games, etc, I don't really see much difference in total size of the resulting SCE than I did with a similar set of TCZs. 

Debian builds packages with all available features included, but it only installs dependencies that are absolutely required to run and it also factors out each package to a greater degree than the TC repo does.  But Debian does not build for smaller size, and in general does pull in more dependencies that most TC packages do. 

So if smaller size is important, then the standard TC repo would get the nod.  But my point is that by the time you have 300MB or 500MB  worth of TCZs installed, there does not seem to be a glaring difference in size between that and one SCE of the same packages.  I don't have numbers for comparison but this is my experience after using both. 

[theYinYeti]

Thank you Jason W for sharing this feedback. My current tce/optional dir is indeed about 750 MB in size, so I guess I could roughly expect a dCore installation to be 1GB or so. I will certainly follow your project, with the hope that not too far from now, I’ll have some time to actually install it!