Re: Stop archive bloat: 47MB gmt-coast-full_19991001-1.deb
On Mon, 18 Oct 1999, John Lapeyre wrote:
> 1 data section
I'm eager to see what'll go in here. It's been said before, but I like the
idea of having raw data readily available. I don't think I like the idea
of putting all of it into the distribution directly -- I think I like the
idea of installer packages better for the more eclectic bits. I don't
think it's our role to debianize everything we can download -- just to
make things easier to install and uninstall. That's what package
management is about to me.
> 2 improved, or logical (flexible) package categories
> (This is related to sub-distributions of Debian.
See my previous suggestions.
> 3 bzip
I *really* like this idea. Anyone have some numbers on how much it could
cut the size of the distro?
> 4 improving multiple document format situation
> ( building docs at install, or somesuch.)
<randomthoughts>
Build-at-install kept me from installing TeX before we went to teTeX. I
just couldn't stand to sit there for 3 days watching it build metafonts.
Documentation is good to have, but do we need it in tex, ps, info, html,
sgml, rtf, pdf, and every other document format ever created? Everything
seems to be moving to HTML. latex2html is a Good Thing(tm). In my perfect
world, I could write a documentation.texi file, then tex it for printed
output, compile it for info browsing, and run latex2html to browse it
through http://localhost/doc/. Don't know if this is possible. Maybe
build-at-install is the answer. That would alleviate the distro bloat, but
not the local installed bloat (I care much less about local). Perhaps we
then give the user a choice (through dinstall or debconf) about their
preferred documentation format, so they have the option of only building
docs in that format.
</randomthoughts>
On a not really related topic, don't the M$ installers have a way of
scripting an install? I'd like to see this capability in dinstall, maybe
debconf too, so that a sysadmin could choose their own defaults and just
let an install run. We did this with Office installs at my high school (CD
key and all), I think.
Sorry for the rapid-fire volley of ideas for major changes in the
distribution. It's late, and I have a Calc test in the morning, which of
course means I'm up brainstorming.
Kevin R. Bullock _
Ringworld.Associates (http://www.ringworld.org/) \_ The two are only connected
St. John's University, Collegeville, MN _/ by my presence in each.
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