Suggest commenting-out deb-src lines in default /etc/apt/sources.list

[Andrew McCarthy]

During a trial install of 11.10 (oneiric) today almost 23MB of sources listings are downloaded (based on "du -csh /var/lib/apt/lists/*_Sources"). Each daily check thereafter will also re-download those files if they are updated. That's a huge waste of time and bandwidth given that the vast majority of users will never download a source packages. The tiny percentage that do will be able to enable the sources if they really want to.

I suggest commenting out these lines by default to improve the speed of installation, marginally reduce disk space requirements, reduce bandwidth use both at install time and each day in the future, and to reduce load on mirrors.

(I couldn't find a package that owns /etc/apt/sources.list so I'm filing this against the installer; apologies if it belongs elsewhere).

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

Thanks for your report. My thoughts on this are in bug 74747.