New Programs for Hardy?

[Matt Zimmerman]

On Sat, Dec 08, 2007 at 10:56:04AM +0100, Martin Pitt wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Joel Bryan Juliano [2007-12-08 13:42 +0800]:
> > 1. Perforation changing 0 bits to lseek(2). (so they don't have a real
> > and definite file size. ~2MB)
> 
> I'm afraid I don't understand that. Do you have a pointer to some
> details?

He's referring to sparse files, which I doubt would save much space because
a) the files are already compressed and b) this only helps for long (>=1
block?) sequences of all zeroes.

mksquashfs, apparently, will detect sparse files in its input and store them
more efficiently in the output.

> > 2. Kernel Modules Stripping. (not possible to remove every symbols,
> > but it's possible to remove useless ones. ~30MB)
> 
> Hm, wow! (IANAKD, can't comment on this).

None of the symbols are "useless".  Some space savings may be possible here
if we created something like the apport retracer for kernel oopses; without
that, removing the symbols would make debugging these painful.

> > 3. On-demand Language download. (remove all languages except EN & GB,
> > but autodownload language on demand. ~160MB)
> 
> We do want to ship with the world's most common languages, and we
> currently spend mabye 30 MB of CD size for that. It varies between
> releases, we just fill up CDs with however many langpacks fit to fill
> it up.

We already do download additional languages on demand for installation, and
it probably isn't very practical to do this for the live environment because
it would use a lot of memory.

> > 4. On-demand Fonts download. (remove all fonts associated with
> > non-existing languages. ~90MB)
> 
> Ideally a default Ubuntu installation has all fonts to display
> everything. We have to compromise a bit and move some out to
> language-support, but recently we already cleaned up fonts, and I
> don't think we ship 90 MB worth of (compressed) CD space.

I don't think we ship fonts for any non-existing languages.  Arne reckons we
can save space with a smaller subset of what we ship today, without giving
up any language support.

> > 5. Remove DiveIntoPython on default installation (~80MB)
> 
> This package needs 1 MB on the CD, not 80.

Indeed, it's only about 4M uncompressed, but it is developer documentation,
and is available on the web, so I do think we could live without it (for the
same reason we removed the selection of Python modules from the desktop).

> > 1. Change Rhythmbox to Banshee. (remove Sound Juicer and Serpentine,
> > since all of those features are available in Banshee. ~30MB)
> 
> Hm, where do you take these numbers from? RB is 3.8 MB, banshee is 2
> (again, compressed).  Removing Sound juicer and Serpentine would be
> great, of course, RB now supports burning CDs; not sure about reading
> them.

I think RB relies on sound-juicer for reading CDs; I'm not sure about the
writing.

-- 
 - mdz