The Xubuntu team had an extra meeting on Monday to discuss and decide a possible move to a bigger ISO size and other important issues for Raring.

After a thorough discussion, which included the obvious drawback that will no longer fit on a CD and the amount of developer time currently spent keeping the ISO small enough to fit on a CD, the team decided that Xubuntu will have a 1GB ISO by clear vote of 8-0. The bigger ISO size will be featured starting from Raring, which is due to be released in April.

With this extra 300MB of space, the team has decided to reintroduce both Gnumeric spreadsheet application and GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) image editor, both of which were dropped for the 12.10 release due to space constraints. Discussion about reintroduction of more of the most popular language packs and extra artwork will continue on the IRC channel #xubuntu-devel and on the Xubuntu development mailing list in the following weeks. As always, the team will adhere to the tenants of the Strategy Document when discussing these changes and strive to not add things to the ISO just because space is available.

Full logs and minutes from our meeting are available on our wiki here.