Remove F-Spot from the LiveCD

[Sense Hofstede]

2009/6/22 Alan Pope <alan at popey.com>:
> Hi Sense,
>
> 2009/6/22 Sense Hofstede <sense at qense.nl>:
>> 2) I mentioned removing Mono from the LiveCD because when F-Spot is
>> gone, just one Mono application remains on the LiveCD: Tomboy. Tomboy
>> is something that's definitely worth including on the LiveCD. However,
>> this single program does require a whole language interpreter to be
>> included on the LiveCD. This is more something for the ongoing
>> discussion about replacing Tomboy with Gnote elsewhere on this list.
>>
>
> There is a spec to replace Rhythmbox with Banshee in this cycle. This
> would mean Tomboy is not the only mono-based application left on the
> CD.
>
That would be a good argument to keep Mono _on_ the LiveCD, although
two (or three) applications still isn't much for such a large program.
However, it is hard to find something currently able to compete to
Banshee. Fortunately projects like Solang have shown that it's
possible to quickly write a reasonable alternative in C/C++, so it
should be possible, but of course we should ask whether it's
desirable. The Banshee discussion has been handled elsewhere and this
is not to place to revive it though, my fault.

Including more Mono applications would justify placing Mono on the
LiveCD, but we should ask ourselves what's more important: supporting
Mono applications on the LiveCD or offering proper localisation
support on the LiveCD. The problem that the boot menu seems to falsely
promise full multi-language support is a critical one.

>> In one sentence: I think F-Spot should be removed from the LiveCD
>> because it's useless on the CD and takes up space that could be used
>> much better.
>>
>
> It's not useless at all. I have used a live CD with F-Spot before now
> to demo that application to a user. This is one of the primary use
> cases of the Live CD - demonstration of the capability of Ubuntu.
>
> In this particular session I had a digital camera containing some
> photos, which I used F-Spot on the Live CD to download. I then made a
> minor change to one of the pictures (red eye removal) and uploaded the
> picture to an online gallery.
>
> Cheers,
> Al.
>
>

Together with the next quote I think we can conclude something.

2009/6/22 Matthew Paul Thomas <mpt at canonical.com>:
> [...]
> | F-Spot isn't exactly the epitome of supreme look & feel and is useless
> | on the LiveCD since there are no photos to use it with.
>
> But nor are there are any e-mail messages to use Evolution with, or IM
> contacts to use Empathy or Pidgin with, or music tracks to use Rhythmbox
> or Banshee with. For all those applications you need to set them up
> after installing them. Why should F-Spot be treated dfferently?

Namely: I was wrong about F-Spot being completely useless on the
LiveCD. Maybe I thought to quickly. I do think that it's use is
limited and the demonstration possibility is poor, but nevertheless
it's indeed not fair to remove this application whereas demoing a
program like Evolution might be even harder, because of the lack of
mail and mail accounts.

I think the ideas of what to do with the freed space removing F-Spot
would give us carried me away and let me ignore the fact that my
assumption it's useless on the LiveCD was wrong. Because I do still
think that the promise of localisation the boot menu gives should be
either sobered or fulfilled. Maybe a better discussion core would have
been saving space on the LiveCD to support more translations and/or
removing not -- by the LiveCD -- supported languages from the menu.

Then we could talk about what could be sacrificed in order to achieve
that and if it would be worth to sacrifice for it.

My apologizes for starting a discussion about an
not-completely-thought-through idea.

Kind regards,
-- 
Sense Hofstede
<http://qense.nl/>

PS: I should watch for assumptions getting stuck in my head next time.
;) It could be dangerous in discussions and debates.