CD image size recovery suggestions

[Øivind Hoel]

On 8/28/06, Colin Watson <cjwatson at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> I spent a little while this evening looking through options for
> recovering the enormous size deficit (up to 30MB in places) on our
> current CD images, and applied one or two things before realising that I
> could easily sort out Ubuntu in the short term by removing lots of
> language packs. However, this isn't an ideal approach in the medium
> term, so I still want to explore options.

I thought supplying language packs was a "special" Ubuntu feature,
though I have to fetch the ones for my language manually after
installation anyway. I don't know how feasible this is, but perhaps
supplying a second "language" cd could be a future solution. This
would probably increase shipit expenses, though.

> Before replying to this on ubuntu-devel suggesting other things to
> remove, *please* check
> http://people.ubuntu.com/~cjwatson/germinate-output/edgy/ to ensure that
> your suggestion will have a measurable impact on CD size. To forestall
> some expected responses, removing very high-profile applications like
> OpenOffice.org or Firefox is not on the table, and since the addition of
> Mono has garnered a certain amount of PR attention I'm not all that keen
> on backing that one out either.

Mono brings hype and attention, where both are good for Ubuntu, in my
opinion. With mono, we can have the Cool New Apps(tm), though this
potential is currently not bearing fruit;

> Various people suggested removing gthumb, since f-spot now replaces it
> (except for some cases where eog fills the gap). This seems potentially
> controversial, but might be reasonable.

People (existing users) who really want gthumb probably have no issues
installing it themselves, and either f-spot or gthumb has to go in my
opinion. EOG does pretty much everything ghtumb does apart from
printing, and this could probably eventually be fixed on the GNOME
front. Maybe we should ship EOG with "Show image collection (F9)" by
default if gthumb is to be removed? This particular functionality in
EOG is apparently non-obvious to old gthumb users.

Back to the mono potential: since we already have mono, perhaps now
would be a good time to debate whether to drop rhytmbox in favour of
banshee? Banshee is much smaller than rhythmbox both in terms of CD
size and installed size, according to my trusty old apt-cache command.
In addition, banshee seems to offer a more complete package,
especially if banshee-official-plugins is also supplied.

> According to a thread on ubuntu-devel@, foomatic-filters-ppds can
> disappear and be replaced by a symlink in the cupsys package. This would
> be good news if true, and would recover 11MB or so from desktop; Martin
> Pitt won't be around this week, but I'll try to look into this or have
> someone who's around do so.
>
> example-content has the 11MB "Experience ubuntu.ogg" video. This was
> sort of a Dapper special, and I wonder if it makes sense to keep it
> around forever. Perhaps, now that most people who would see it in Edgy
> have seen it already, we should move it out to a separate package and
> drop it from the CDs. Mark, what do you think?

In its current form, I personally find the Experience ubuntu.ogg both
boring and a waste of space. It's purpose could probably be served in
a more meaningful way.

-- 

Øivind