Comment 2 for bug 105511

While it would be lovely to make the live environment consistent with installed systems in this regard (generally one of its design goals), I'm afraid it simply isn't feasible right now.

Enabling universe and multiverse means having their Packages files present in the live filesystem. Here are their current file sizes, along with their size when compressed using lzma (which is likely to be at least as good as squashfs' compression):

  $ ls -l /var/lib/apt/lists/archive.ubuntu.com_ubuntu_dists_intrepid_{universe,multiverse}_binary-i386_Packages
  -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 955011 2008-10-09 00:25 /var/lib/apt/lists/archive.ubuntu.com_ubuntu_dists_intrepid_multiverse_binary-i386_Packages
  -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 21744533 2008-10-08 11:27 /var/lib/apt/lists/archive.ubuntu.com_ubuntu_dists_intrepid_universe_binary-i386_Packages
  $ cat /var/lib/apt/lists/archive.ubuntu.com_ubuntu_dists_intrepid_{universe,multiverse}_binary-i386_Packages | lzma -9c | wc -c
  4243872

4MB or so. (gzip comes out at more like 6MB, so it may be more than 4MB.) If you include Sources as well, which would ordinarily be the default, that costs a further 2MB:

  $ ls -l /var/lib/apt/lists/archive.ubuntu.com_ubuntu_dists_intrepid_{universe,multiverse}_source_Sources
  -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 432417 2008-10-09 00:31 /var/lib/apt/lists/archive.ubuntu.com_ubuntu_dists_intrepid_multiverse_source_Sources
  -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 9228693 2008-10-08 11:32 /var/lib/apt/lists/archive.ubuntu.com_ubuntu_dists_intrepid_universe_source_Sources
  $ cat /var/lib/apt/lists/archive.ubuntu.com_ubuntu_dists_intrepid_{universe,multiverse}_source_Sources | lzma -9c | wc -c
  2003104

Right now, the Ubuntu Intrepid i386 desktop CD is running at about 3MB below the physical limit for 700MB CDs, and amd64 is under 1MB below. We are perpetually short of space here, and I'm afraid I simply can't justify throwing out localisation and/or features in order to enable universe and multiverse on the desktop CD.

That said, we can afford the space on the DVD, and I've arranged for the live filesystems on the DVDs to have universe and multiverse enabled from now on. That doesn't close this bug, but I think it's about as much as we can do for now.

livecd-rootfs (0.72) intrepid; urgency=low

  * Fix source mirror for -updates in generated sources.list (it was
    incorrect for ports architectures).
  * Fix description of universe in generated sources.list: packages there
    are expected to be under a free licence.
  * Enable universe and multiverse for DVDs (there isn't generally enough
    space on CDs; see LP #105511).

 -- Colin Watson <email address hidden> Thu, 09 Oct 2008 02:13:41 +0100