Re: dvd space issues

[Petter Reinholdtsen <pere@hungry.com>]

[Holger Levsen]
> Hi,

Hi.

> we could solve the DVD space issues by simply dropping the idea of
> having multiarch DVDs and instead publish 3 DVDs, one i386, one
> amd64, plus source DVDs.
>
> What do you think? 

I think we should evaluate the cost and benefits of doing this, and
make a decision based on that knowledge.  What problems and advantages
for the users, administrators, distributors and developers do you see
for the current approach and a splitted approach.  Perhaps something
for a wiki page to gather the arguments for and against?

Why is it that no-one is willing to spend time evaluating the packages
we install today, to see if they all make sense?  We have duplicate
functionally all over the place, but no-one seem willing to spend the
time to figure out which package are good and which are not good
enough to be part of the default installation set.  We get random
single proposals like dropping blender, but no structured evaluation
of the packages we install.  How many chemical molecule visualizer do
we need?  Which ones should we keep?  How many mathematical graph
drawer applications do we need?  How many video players do we need.

All these are questions raised by me on
<URL: http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Status/Squeeze >, but no-one
seem to be interested enough and have free time enough to work on it.
Perhaps we should just set a cutoff point based on popcon.debian.org
numbers?  Perhaps we should only keep packages that are translated to
our core languages.  Perhaps we should drop those pulling in old a lot
of libraries.  Perhaps we should combine these and other criteria to
generate a score for each package and use that score to drop packages.
I do not know and do not have the spare time to spend on it.  But I do
know we install some crappy software and heaps of duplicated
functionallity, and believe we should start there to increase the
quality of the Debian Edu distribution.

Happy hacking,
-- 
Petter Reinholdtsen