Another idea for comments

[Len Ovens]

On Sat, July 28, 2012 8:23 pm, Emmet Hikory wrote:

>     Another option would be to include all the workflows in the live
> environment, again modify the ubiquity frontend, and uninstall all the
> workflows *not* selected by the user during the software removal phase.
> The main issues with this solution are that either the user might end up
> missing software they expected to be there (because they failed to select
> some workflow they wanted but didn't know they wanted), and that the
> uninstallation phase will take a long time/waste a lot of power/${random
> negative interpretation of shipping "useless" software and removing it}.

Last cycle ubiquity seemed to copy everything from the cd/dvd to the drive
and then remove things not needed (like ubiquity itself). I have noticed
that this cycle, ubiquity has a stage where it "calculates" which files
not to copy in the first place. I would think this calculation would take
the same amount of time if the files not to be copied was large or small
(I could be wrong) and there would be no files removed at the end.

However, my concern is that installing from a live dvd/cd has some
interesting effects on depends. These effects are not very noticeable for
most flavours of ubuntu because they have one set of software that they
install not 5 or 6. The install depends on everything, that is in our case
where in the past graphics items would have depended on the graphics meta
with the alt install, with the live ubiquity install those apps also
depend on the install itself. This means, if the user chooses to uninstall
one of these metas, the meta itself is uninstalled but not the apps that
should only be dependants of that meta. This has meant that some users
have uninstalled the apps manually not realizing that one or two of the
apps might also be a depend for another package (like a font for desktop
in the case that started me looking at this). These users end up with a
broken system.

Perhaps this should be considered a bug in the ubiquity installer or the
live dvd/cd.

Users seem to have no problem with the idea that we have a live ISO with
all the apps on it so users can see them and that the install would be the
same for that reason, but they do seem to expect they can remove parts of
it.

>     Separately from the above, as part of my catch-up reading, I thought
> there
> were some threads about merging the live and alternate images.  While I

Yikes! My first thought is that would greatly increase our ISO size (I was
thinking double) but it would allow a better install. We do have one of
the biggest ISOs and doubling it does not leave much room on a DVD... but,
I think the future of things is to install from usb stick anyway. DVD
drives are less often included as part of the hardware already, most new
home video systems also accept USB sticks... I think it is only a matter
of time before home movies are distributed on a read only memory stick (or
maybe even with a limited number of plays). Anyway, it will be interesting
to see where this goes.

Len

-- 
Len Ovens
www.OvenWerks.net