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1b1ed1a
(Get the code!)
= Personal experience =
I wanted to install lyx and was horrified to see the download would be 438MB which would translate to 745MB of disk usage. After a little investigation, it turns out more than 70% of the download and almost 60% of the disk space was documentation. I looked through all the dependencies but was thoroughly lost. I couldn't figure out the tree of dependencies that caused every documentation package to be installed. Instead I created an equivs package to avoid installing all the -doc packages. For anyone else finding this bug, I published the package here:
http://
Through further research it seems like a simpler solution might be to exclude the recommended packages. I'll update my post once I figure out the details.
= History =
Norbert, you said this has been discussed on the Debian bug tracking system and debian tex-maint mailing list. Is that correct?
I found a bug, but I'm struggling to find anything in the mailing list.
http://
Do you know specifically where I can find the previous discussions? Or suggestions on how to find them? I've run several searches on the debian mailing list search, but I've been unable to find anything relevant.
http://
= Licensing =
In debian bug 515051 you said 'It is not necessarily a case of "prefer" but of "license" ...'. I took this to mean that the license of texlive / tex requires that the documentation be included. Is that an accurate interpretation of what you meant?
I found what I believe to be the texlive license here:
http://
I don't see anything in that document that specifies a need for documentation to be included in distributions. Perhaps I've misunderstood something here. Can you point me in the right direction?
= Philosophy =
I feel like having the packages at "recommends" might offer a good solution for users familiar with apt and dependency choices. Personally, this issue is the first time I've ever come to realise that recommended packages are installed by default. I've been an Ubuntu user for about 3 years and consider myself fairly technically minded. It's something that had simply never crossed my path.
For a user like myself, changing the packages to suggest would save me 320Mb of download bandwidth. In my personal circumstances, and most likely, to anyone not living in the first world, that's a significant amount of data. In the case of a user wanting to install lyx, I feel strongly that the documentation for the underlying packages is not necessary.
I believe Ubuntu has a strong focus on usability. I searched for a reference for that belief. I found only references on wikipedia dating back to 2006. If that focus on usability has changed, I think it makes sense to leave the doc packages at recommends. If not, if Ubuntu still aims to be linux for human beings, then I think the best option to serve that aim is to switch the doc packages to suggests instead.