brainstorming for UDS-N - Performance - disk footprint

[Dustin Kirkland]

On Mon, Oct 4, 2010 at 10:08 AM, Luke Faraone <luke at faraone.cc> wrote:
> On 10/04/2010 01:05 PM, Dustin Kirkland wrote:
>> 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.
>
> This would be great, as long as I'm able to install a package which
> contains the manpages for everything in main for systems where I don't
> have outside internet access.

Right, the "don't install manpages" trick uses a hack to a dpkg
configuration that Martin Pitt wrote.  Basically, you can create globs
or regexes for files you *don't* want dpkg to actually install.  So if
you blacklist /usr/share/man, you can keep these from landing on your
installed system.  I'm suggesting that we make this configuration
change for you, IF you select the "Minimal" server installation.  You
could change it at a later time by removing some meta package and/or
overriding the configuration.

:-Dustin