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 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.
+