brainstorming for UDS-N - Performance - disk footprint

[Dustin Kirkland]

On Tue, Oct 5, 2010 at 4:33 AM, Stephan Hermann <sh at sourcecode.de> wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 04, 2010 at 10:05:33AM -0700, Dustin Kirkland wrote:
>> 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.
>>
>> From a server perspective, we're less (immediately) concerned with the
>> size on the CD, as we are with the footprint of the installed system.
>>
>> I'm proposing that we offer 3 install methods from a single 11.04 Server CD:
>>  a) Install Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud
>>  b) Install Ubuntu Server (Deluxe)
>>  c) Install Ubuntu Server (Minimal)
>>
>> The minimal install would be as small as possible, with no recommended
>> packages, and a pruning of documentation, manpages, and any other
>> unnecessary overhead like unused kernel modules.  This system would be
>> a great building block for appliances, virtual machines, and
>> single-purpose servers.  This would embrace and enhance JeOS, and make
>> it easier to install, directly from the Server CD, as a
>> supported/tested mode of installation.
>
> Do you really think that makes sense?

I do think a split between Server-minimal and Server-deluxe makes sense.

Because for every person (like you and I) that says...

> etckeeper byobu and sshd enabled by default should be the default for the
> server install, eventually asking "which VCS backend do you want to use" via
> debconf/preseeding + asking for the location and username + password

Someone else will come along and say:

> I think the default CD image of ubuntu-server is already oversized for a small
> footprint of server installs.

There's two conflicting camps that the current Ubuntu Server Install
is failing to satisfy:
 * people who want the server to be as absolutely small as possible
 * people who want the server to be a useful set of server packages to
base a server installation on

We're currently about half way in between these two camps, and
satisfying neither, in my opinion.

:-Dustin