Comment 4 for bug 55925

I'm afraid nothing can really be done about this. The reason the .template is so big is that it has to include the squashfs on the DVD (basically the bulk of the desktop CD). Jigdo doesn't know how to construct a squashfs out of .debs, which is no wonder because it's a filesystem constructed by installing all the packages and a few other things and then running mksquashfs over it. Jigdo can deal fine with ISO9660 images because they just have the .debs plugged into them at known offsets, whereas this isn't at all the case with squashfs images and can't be made to be the case without essentially writing a new set of tools to do it.

Even though it's not as good as it might be, Jigdo is still a useful download method here; the .template should rsync well against previous versions, and failing that it still substantially reduces the amount of download from heavily-loaded DVD mirror sites.