Re: Stop archive bloat: 47MB gmt-coast-full_19991001-1.deb
Sven LUTHER <luther@maxime.u-strasbg.fr> writes:
> On Mon, Oct 18, 1999 at 05:07:58AM -0500, Andrew G . Feinberg wrote:
> > On Mon, Oct 18, 1999 at 01:43:42AM -0600, Jason Gunthorpe wrote:
> > >
> > > We badly need to prune stuff and be more efficient.
> > This means restraint. There is a desire to package anything and everything
> > that might be useful to someone, but quite frankly I think that we need to
> > go through the package list, and remove stuff. lots of stuff. stuff that
> > we determine just doesn't need to be there. we can put it somewhere other
> > than main, or just dump it. either way, we need to reduce the size of the
> > distribution that is sold in CD format (5 CDs? i know we have source but
> > this is getting absurd!) and trim the mirrored portion of the archive (we
> > need to decide what exactly should be mirrored, which is another advantage
> > to more stringently regulate what goes in main.
> >
> > Debian _is_ bloated. This is a good thing, and it also really sucks. We
> > need to find a balance between offering users choice and variety of
> > applications, and maintaining a sane ftp archive and keeping the number of
> > CDs reasonable (four at maximum I would think.) Some stuff just doesn't
> > need to be distributed to everyone when its use is so narrow in scope.
>
> What happened to the data section project, this gmt package is just data, the
> worlds coastline in very detailled format i think. It is useful, and is not a
> bloat. A bloat was when there were more than two version of the x sources
> around, the normal one and one for ARM or something like that.
I'm just asking for some common sense. This package has 3 different
levels of details for the world coastline (low, high and full). Are
they really needed ? Can't just a low can provided with some pointers
to where to get the additional data ?
As a matter of facts, I'm kind of opposed to packaging "pure
data" (this encloses bible-kjv, anarcho-syndicalism.deb, etc) because
for "pure data", packaging is minimal (just dump the file(s) into
/usr/share/doc and that's it). This doesn't apply to some reasonably
sized "pure data" like /usr/share/dict/words etc...
If we go on this way, we can't package the whole Gutenberg project
(add a whopping 10 extra CDs), the noise in my kitchen as a .wav
(would make a great datafile for mxv, xwave or xmms)...
Does this belong into -project ?
Phil.
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