Prioritising packages for the Debian Edu /
Skolelinux DVD, which is
supposed provide a school with all the services and user applications
needed on the pupils computer network has always been hard. Even
schools without Internet connections should be able to get Debian Edu
working using this DVD.
The job became a lot harder when apt and aptitude started
installing recommended packages by default. We want the same set of
packages to be installed when using the DVD and the netinst CD, and
that means all recommended packages need to be on the DVD. I created
a patch for debian-cd in BTS
report #601203 to do this, and since this change was applied to
the Debian Edu DVD build, we have been seriously short on space.
A few days ago we decided to drop blender, wxmaxima and kicad from
the default installation to save space on the DVD, believing that
those needing these applications are few and can get them from the
Debian archive.
Yesterday, I had a look what source packages to see which packages
were using most space. A few large packages are well know;
openoffice.org, openclipart and fluid-soundfont. But I also
discovered that lilypond used 106 MiB and fglrx-driver used 53 MiB.
The lilypond package is pulled in as a dependency for rosegarden, and
when looking a bit closer I discovered that 99 MiB of the 106 MiB were
the documentation package, which is recommended by the binary package.
I decided to drop this documentation package from our DVD, as most of
our users will use the GUI front-ends and do not need the lilypond
documentation. Similarly, I dropped the non-free fglrx-driver package
which might be installed by d-i when its hardware is detected, as the
free X driver should work.
With this change, we finally got space for the LXDE and Gnome
desktop packages as well as the language specific packages making the
DVD more useful again.
