[custom] Localized CD with pruned locale data
CDDs may be tailored for a particular purpose, such as to distribute to a
small group where the locales of all users is known (or assumed). In order
to include the maximum useful material per media it would be useful in such
cases to prune any unnecessary locale data provided by the included
packages. However, to do so would be to damage the packages that provide
that data.
Is a CDD that is tailored in this fashion still "Debian"? Take, for
example, a package with missing locales that is used by a user who desires a
different locale. Such a user might be inclined to file a bug against the
modified package, but the maintainer of the "buggy" package would probably
not immediately recognize the cause of the problem, wasting their valuable
time.
Do mechanisms exist within Debian for providing such tailoring? Should they
exist?
Locales are only one example of "bloat"[0] that might be desirable to trim
for a CDD. In general, how do we allow CDDs to be "pure Debian" and still
make efficient use of media space?
Ben Armstrong
[0] It almost goes without saying that one person's bloat is another
person's valuable feature. When you produce something for users
that don't need a resource-consuming feature, the feature is bloat.
--
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