Removing Bloat from the next Live CD (Desktop)

[quickbooks office]

PS> I Posted this to the devel mailing list a while back and was told
to post here instead;

---------------

Removing Bloat from the next Live CD (Desktop) :


I have noticed alot of packages are included in the Live CD which are
not really used by users who only speak English.


I think it really makes sense to split the Live CD into 2 versions.


The default version will be for English only.


The second Live CD (not the default) will be English + international
languages support.


=============

Here are the packages which I believe can be removed without any
adverse effects:

ibus
ibus-chewing
ibus-gtk2
ibus-gtk3
ibus-hangul
ibus-kkc
ibus-libpinyin
ibus-m17n
ibus-rawcode
ibus-setup
ibus-wayland

libchewing

libpinyin
libpinyin-data

opencc

lohit-assamese-fonts
lohit-bengali-fonts
lohit-devanagari-fonts
lohit-gujarati-fonts
lohit-kannada-fonts
lohit-malayalam-fonts
lohit-oriya-fonts
lohit-punjabi-fonts
lohit-tamil-fonts
lohit-telugu-fonts
jomolhari-fonts
vlgothic-fonts
cjkuni-uming-fonts
wqy-zenhei-fonts
thai-scalable-fonts-common
thai-scalable-waree-fonts
smc-fonts-common
smc-meera-fonts
sil-abyssinica-fonts
sil-mingzat-fonts
sil-nuosu-fonts
sil-padauk-fonts
nhn-nanum-fonts-common
nhn-nanum-gothic-fonts
paratype-pt-sans-fonts
google-noto-sans-lisu-fonts
google-noto-sans-mandaic-fonts
google-noto-sans-meeteimayek-fonts
google-noto-sans-tagalog-fonts
google-noto-sans-tai-tham-fonts
google-noto-sans-tai-viet-fonts
khmeros-base-fonts
lklug-fonts
paktype-naqsh-fonts
tabish-eeyek-fonts

If you know a package I may have missed above please let me know.

Thanks.

[Josh Boyer]

On Sun, Jul 13, 2014 at 2:31 PM, quickbooks office
<quickbooks.office(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote:
>  PS> I Posted this to the devel mailing list a while back and was
> told
>  to post here instead;
>
>  ---------------
>
>  Removing Bloat from the next Live CD (Desktop) : 
I'm not aware of anyone working on the old Desktop spin.  Work for F21
has progressed to the Workstation Live image.

>  I have noticed alot of packages are included in the Live CD which
> are
>  not really used by users who only speak English.
>
>
>  I think it really makes sense to split the Live CD into 2 versions.
>
>
>  The default version will be for English only.
>
>
>  The second Live CD (not the default) will be English + international
>  languages support. 
That requires double the QA maintenance and additional maintenance on
the kickstart creation side.  It also creates confusion and clutter on
the downloads page.  I'm not sure this is really worth the effort
given that we're intentionally adding a significant amount of packages
to support things like QT/KDE apps.

josh

[Elad Alfassa]

We will not remove any of these. These fonts are required for
internationalization and localization. There are many people in the world
who don't speak English, or want/need to read+write text in languages which
are not English. ibus and these fonts are extremely important for this. We
are not going to create one English edition and another International
edition - anyone who installs Fedora should be able to use it no matter
what language they speak.

I am not a Workstation WG member, but I do care about internationalization
and localization and I think the WG members will agree with me on this
subject.
-- 
-Elad Alfassa.

[Donald Buchan]

On Sun, 2014-07-13 at 11:31 -0700, quickbooks office wrote:
>  PS> I Posted this to the devel mailing list a while back and was
> told
>  to post here instead;
>  
>  ---------------
>  
>  Removing Bloat from the next Live CD (Desktop) :
>  
>  
>  I have noticed alot of packages are included in the Live CD which are
>  not really used by users who only speak English.
>  
>  
>  I think it really makes sense to split the Live CD into 2 versions.
>  
>  
>  The default version will be for English only.
>  
>  
>  The second Live CD (not the default) will be English + international
>  languages support.
>  
>  
>  =============
>  
>  Here are the packages which I believe can be removed without any
>  adverse effects: 
(snipetty snip)

One of my beefs several versions back (0) about the Fedora LiveCD was
that it didn't include OpenOffice.org (now LibreOffice) at the time,
which was no doubt due to space constraints on the physical media.  To
me this was a killer exclusion and, while I understood why, I felt that
the Fedora desktop spin fell flat.  As a marketing tool in order to
attract new users, it was trying to be good for everybody but really
ending up being too general and diluted for most as a desktop, and
frankly at the time I felt that Ubuntu's LiveCD was a far better desktop
out-of-the-box (even though to make the two comparable only took a few
more minutes, but, admittedly, not for a novice with no clue how to do
it.)

A spin should be useful out of the box to its intended target audience.
Yes, I know that in trying to make space you are suggesting that either
the download would become less heavy bandwidth-wise, more broadly
installable on the various limited-sized media available to users, have
more space for "useful" applications in order to be more appealing, or
some mix of these three.

That being said, and without being able to speak for those who actually
do the work from which I benefit, my knee-jerk reaction is that:

- It would create two parallel, distinct spins which would require a lot
of duplicated work to maintain two iso's whose goals would nominally be
to be technically identical to each other save the internationalization;
- The logical conclusion of such a move would be to still have a
dominant spin which would get most of the love and attention --
presumably, the English spin, although who knows, maybe the
international spin -- and end up with a niche spin which may (or may
not) be relegated to oblivion (I can't quickly locate a page I saw a few
years ago on spin download stats; suffice it to say that after the XFCE
download, which was something like the #3 downloaded Fedora Spin, the
numbers dropped from the hundreds if not thousands down to low tens);
- It goes against Fedora's goals of Fedora being accessible to all as
opposed to being an elitist spin reserved for those with a sufficient
grasp of English -- in the case of the English spin were to become the
dominant spin -- and again would be a poor move toward creating a
marketing tool.

In any case, the marketing and technical direction has been moving away
from Fedora being presented -- except, presumably, for the distribution
as a whole, including all the software in the repositories -- as a
"general purpose operating system" and toward a somewhat more technical
distro.  Despite this, internationalization is a core and integral tenet
of Fedora no matter what.

--

(0) http://www.malak.ca/blog/?p=227