Why are all packages getting so much bigger?

[Petter Reinholdtsen <pere@hungry.com>]

While working on the Debian Edu CD building, I notice fewer and fewer
of the packages we want fit on the CD any more.  Everything seem to
increase in size.  Comparing it to the sarge versions, we are running
seriously short on CD space.  Here are some random examples of
packagse including some dependencies.

  package        kiB-sarge  kiB-etch   increase
  ---------------------------------------------
  hdparm          50         57         14%
  kghostview     222        228          2%
  lsscsi          11         19         72%
  mdadm          101        155         53%
  openssl        887        969          9%
  rdesktop        92        101          9%
  samba         4392       5440         23%
  slapd         1079       1353         25%
  tcptraceroute   29         97        234%
  zip             97        104          7%

Did anyone investigate why packages increase so much in size?  Did the
compiler start generating large binaries?  Some of this will be
because changelog increase in size, but I doubt it can have that large
impact on the package sizes.

The increased size make it very hard for our custom Debian
distribution to fit on the CD we want to fit on. :/

Friendly,
-- 
Petter Reinholdtsen