ubiquity pulls in extra software

[Iain Buclaw]

If connected to the net, Ubiquity installs language-packs and openoffice as an added extra.

Whilst nothing major, this does increase the size of the installation by downloading 130MBs of packages which uses 450MBs of space on the drive. Worst case scenario, we are unable to install Zenix on a partition smaller than 3GBs due to lack of free disk space.

[Iain Buclaw (iainb)]

Tracing this bug, the issue is to do with one package that is greedy on just what it depends on. (sound familiar?)

The package this time being "language-support-%s", and oddly enough it seems that "language-support-en" is the worst of these packages, as it depends on others that require openoffice to be installed!
Just flicking through the other language-support packages, and no other appears to be affected by this.

A quick search on launchpad, and this is a duplicate of 68464

[Iain Buclaw (iainb)]

This is harder one to work around than what I original thought it be.

Rather than tweaking debconf, this package is installed via a hard-coded line in the Ubiquity installer.

That makes the possible solutions:
1) Just advise English users to press 'Skip' when it comes up about Language Support
2) Rebuild the language-support-en package, or one of it's dependencies (that pulls in openoffice) to NOT depend on it.
3) Remove or comment out line 1348 from /usr/share/ubiquity/install.py so it looks like this:
            # More extensive language support packages
            #to_install.append('language-support-%s' %lp)

I'm in favour of option 3, as it is the least amount of hassle.

[Iain Buclaw (iainb)]

Just checked, and the problem is no longer present in Ubuntu Lucid.

[~] sudo apt-get install language-support-en
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
The following extra packages will be installed:
  hunspell-en-ca hunspell-en-us language-support-writing-en myspell-en-au myspell-en-za wamerican wbritish
Suggested packages:
  hunspell openoffice.org-hunspell openoffice.org-core
The following NEW packages will be installed
  hunspell-en-ca hunspell-en-us language-support-en language-support-writing-en myspell-en-au myspell-en-za wamerican wbritish
0 upgraded, 8 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
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