Installing recommends and the CD size

[Cory K.]

Martin Pitt wrote:
> Michael Vogt [2008-08-08 21:40 +0200]:
>   
>> But it feels to me like we are also doing it now because of size
>> constrains on the CD. 
>>     
>
> That's actually not quite true. We didn't *drop* those extra
> features/packages, we just didn't *add* them now.
>
> That problem is not related at all to the semantics of Recommends,
> it has been existing forever in Ubuntu.
>
>   
>> I would like to discsuss alternative solutions for this problem:
>>
>> * we could make the CD image scripts not install recommends by
>> default and add a hook similar to the language pack downloads that
>> offers to download and install the missing bits. I think if we are
>> careful with what we allow in here the size that is going to be
>> downloaded is in the range of ~20mb (and its fully optional).
>>     
>
> That feels like a bad solution to me. Then the CD wouldn't provide a
> complete desktop any more, but people would feel urged to download
> lots of stuff afterwards and wonder why they just downloaded/installed
> a CD. It would make the CD less useful for offline installations.
>
>   
>> * we could build the CD without recommends and have additional dvd or
>> 1gb usb stick images that contain the missing recommends so that
>> people with more BW can just get those
>>     
>
> I'd rather provide a complete 1 GB install image than just an "addon"
> image, since it's much easier to handle. (Provided that we can afford
> the mirror space, etc.)
>
> However, given that we get quite a lot of feedback on CDs, and have
> trouble finding DVD testers, I'd like to keep the images as small as
> possible. I guess it's similar to websites, every additional 100 MB
> costs you so many (100K? million?) downloaders because it's too much
> for their bandwidth/quota.
>
> My feeling is that part of Ubuntu's success is that it is slick and
> small, not overloaded with features, quick to download, and has one
> tool for one purpose (our original design goal). I appreciate that we
> can't always follow the latter, since upstream imposes a lot of weird
> stuff on us (like forcing us to install three HTML rendering engines
> on CDs, xulrunner, gtkhtml, and now webkit, or quite a lot of
> programming languages (Mono, JRE, Python, etc), but our constant
> struggle for space forces us to stay aware of these issues, sort them
> out as soon as possible, and keeps us from building up too much cruft.
> As such, the limited CD space has its advantages, too.
>
> Martin
>   

Just to chime in a bit here. Ubuntu Studios #1 request is a CD
sized-release. (as we only release a DVD) We try to keep our size down
as much as we can but for us a CD just wasn't possible to get the things
most of our target audience required. Recommends on our disk has now
added about 200MB. We're working on finding a solution to this as it
really has added alot of cruft for us.

But for Ubuntu I agree that it's CD size has been a big part of it's
success and not providing that would be a negative.

-Cory K.