Making linaro-nano smaller or Give Up Disk Space for Lent

[Loïc Minier]

On Fri, Mar 11, 2011, Dave Martin wrote:
> As I understand it, debootstrap or germinate basically do the right
> thing.  All we would need would be to document the use of the existing
> tools, and provide suitable ultra-minimal seeds (at the level of
> busybox+libc only) and/or an ultra-minimal --variant for debootstrap.

 So far, the two approaches which had been proposed were:
 * an initramfs-tools based initrd which would copy selected binaries
   manually; this probably gives a very minimal root image, but it's a
   bit cumbersome to manage for us
 * a classic seed based image; this is convenient to generate, but it's
   not particularly small

 The custom debootstrap script you're proposing is one way; I would also
 think we could consider the udeb route: udebs are meant to be small and
 used in Debian Installer which offers a rescue system.  D-I also has
 fancy things like openssh, and can retrieve additional components from
 the network -- as long as they are udeb-ified.  D-I images already
 exist as initrds today, with very small sizes; you can browse random
 image types under
 http://ftp.debian.org/debian/dists/stable/main/installer-armel/current/images/

 Even full images not requiring the network to start the installer like
 the hd-media boot image have an easy time beating our current sizes:
 http://ftp.debian.org/debian/dists/stable/main/installer-i386/current/images/hd-media/
 (this is i386 as there is no armel one)

 Note that boot.img above is 24M compressed and 250M decompressed, but
 I'm assuming we can use a compressed initrd for everything so that the
 compressed size would be what matters.

   Cheers,
-- 
Loïc Minier