brainstorming for UDS-N - Performance - disk footprint

[Dustin Kirkland]

Martin Pitt <martin.pitt at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> Perhaps only slightly related to performance, but we need to work on
> our installation disk size footprint and CD size. We keep shipping
> fewer and fewer translations, and we grew some fat in installed
> libraries.
>
> There's also the idea of merging the Ubuntu Desktop and Netbook
> flavors into just one CD image, which will also take some extra space.
>
> This includes:
>
>  * Searching for and eliminating duplicate libraries, programs, etc.
>
>  * Reduce programming language support, or eliminate unnecessary parts
>   of it. E. g. in a custom OEM project we eliminated Perl, and
>   perhaps we could also remove some parts of Erlang/Python/etc. that
>   we ship by default.
>
>  * Eliminiate unnecessary files (duplicate fonts, documentation); a
>   rather bold proposal would e. g. be to remove package changelogs
>   entirely and instead provide an easy way to open the changelog for
>   a particular package in a browser.
>
>  * Optimize images in packages, as proposed by Louis Simard in May.
>
>  * [Your idea here]

Hi Martin,

Thanks for bringing this up!

I like the idea of moving almost all documentation to the web.
manpages.ubuntu.com has both an HTML rendering of every manpage, as
well as the .gz original manpage.  The 'dman' utility can remotely
retrieve manpages from m.u.c and display them on a console.  It could
easily be enhanced to cache them locally in /var/cache, too.
Generically, it would be awesome if there were a web API for most of
/usr/, such that a custom tailored wget or curl utility could remotely
retrieve them on demand.