Source packages appropriate by default?

[Robie Basak]

On Tue, Jul 23, 2013 at 09:31:15PM -0400, Scott Kitterman wrote:
> Before we run off and expend a lot more effort on this, I'd like to
> see something other than handwaving that this is really is a
> significant issue.

[size comparisions snipped]

My concern is latency, not size. How many round trips will we save this
way? For cloud images using Amazon S3 mirrors, for example, each request
is quite a bit slower AIUI, and apt-get doesn't currently support
concurrent requests to a single server.

This is a pain for instances that start up with cloud-init and
immediately have to update sources and install things before they can
become functional. It'd be nice to see the delay from "juju deploy" to
having a live service running get shorter. Same for "juju add-unit".
Admittedly an alternative means to achieve this could be to have
cloud-init remove the deb-src lines first, but it seems a shame to leave
others behind if this really does improve things.

I agree that I should come up with actual figures before pushing ahead
for this reason.