OpenOffice Locales / desktop-seed (was: adding mozilla-firefox-locale-* to the desktop ?)

[Paul Sladen]

On Sat, 18 Sep 2004, Paul Sladen wrote:
> On Fri, 17 Sep 2004, Matt Zimmerman wrote:
> > On Sat, Sep 18, 2004 at 12:43:47AM +0200, Sebastien Bacher wrote:
> > > consider adding the mozilla-firefox-locale-* to the desktop seed ?
> > On i386, this would add 2M to the CD and 5M to the desktop install, so I
> > don't see a problem with the size (unlike with openoffice.org).
> If this type of thing (lots of locales) becomes an issue, I've just done a
> test which has got the above packages down by 50%. (Mozilla)

I've spent the afternoon playing further.  By using the following:

  * combining multiple locales
  * zero-compressing internal zipfiles  (eg. template files)
  * reordering the tar  (eg. like files in each locale are adjacent)
  * bzip2  (eg. can handle 900kB aggregations)

I've managed to get a 33% saving across the first 11 languages [af..es].  
Which is a drop from 30MB to 20MB.  Extrapolated across all 23 languages,
that _may_ represent a drop from 73MB to ~49MB.

I was hoping for 50% but, on well...  :-(

Having said that, the more I think about it.  When an average Windows luser
buys a new machine, they are primarily interested in two things:

  * The Office Suite
  * The Operating System

Given the elevated status of these two items, maybe it's not so extreme to
give them a disproportion amount of space (as long as it is /restrained/ as
much as possible...).   Writeup here:

  http://wiki.ubuntulinux.org/HoaryHedgehog/OpenOffice/L10nCompression

	-Paul

(BTW, what's the deal with the 200MB 'openoffice-amd64' package)...
-- 
Is there no safe way to travel?  Nottingham, GB