Comment 9 for bug 790608

Well I think I need to understand what customised sounds are actually in the sound-theme-ubuntu package? What do you actually override or disabled from the fdo theme?

Once I know this, I can perhaps advise a bit better, but the advice will generally be the same: try and merge as many customisations as possible directly into sound-theme-fdo package and submit upstream. The idea of the fdo package is to be lean and only contain essential sounds (e.g. voip ringing, IM signon/offs/new message, Mail new message etc.) These are sounds you will *want* to have even on a live CD, so room needs to be found, or you should drop the IM apps, the voip apps and the mail apps etc too.

You could also consider putting smaller versions (e.g. higher compression, lower sample spec) of the files in place to save a few kb here and there.

If you feel you have to disable some of the base sounds, then perhaps this should be discussed upstream? e.g. if you feel you can disable it, then it is perhaps superfluous and can be omitted. The important part here is that this discussion should happen upstream. You can use the libcanberra list for this discussion.

Really I'd rather talk about specifics. There are only 35 sounds over all:
alarm-clock-elapsed
audio-channel-front-center
audio-channel-front-left
audio-channel-front-right
audio-channel-rear-center
audio-channel-rear-left
audio-channel-rear-right
audio-channel-side-left
audio-channel-side-right
audio-test-signal
audio-volume-change
bell
camera-shutter
complete
device-added
device-removed
dialog-error
dialog-information
dialog-warning
message-new-instant
message
network-connectivity-established
network-connectivity-lost
phone-incoming-call
phone-outgoing-busy
phone-outgoing-calling
power-plug
power-unplug
screen-capture
service-login
service-logout
suspend-error
trash-empty
window-attention
window-question

Which of these do you feel are not essential for a desktop system? The test sounds in particular are IMO essential to allow people to configure their sound system appropriately. I can see you wanting to replace the login/logout sounds to customise it to Ubuntu, in which case I'd say you could relatively safely patch those sounds out the way.