lack of gnome on squeeze CD #1

[Joey Hess]

The squeeze CD #1 [a], which is probably still one of the most commonly
mass-produced Debian CDs, no longer contains the Gnome desktop
environment, or any self-contained working desktop environment. I believe
the multiarch CD [b] also lacks a DE. I wanted to bring this to the
attention of the desktop and gnome team, who presumably might care, since
I have seen mentions of it, but nobody taking action to fix this.

Apparently the desktop task is just too large for the CD now. The minimum
packages that *must* be on the CD for the desktop task to be offered
at all are as follows:

	gnome-desktop-environment
	xorg
	xserver-xorg-video-all
	xserver-xorg-input-all
	desktop-base
	menu
	iceweasel

Some of this could be trimmed, but not much. All told, it
comes to 551 MB of packages. Leaving out the last 2 packages
from the list, it's 550 MB of packages. Leaving out Recommends,
405 MB. IIRC, debian-cd currently treats Recommends like Depends,
and always includes them.

So, some options:

1. Ship squeeze with a CD that requires a fast network to be useful.
   Sorta like the netinst CD, but bigger.  The default choice.
2. Switch the first CD to be the KDE CD [c], or the XFCE+LXDE CD [d].
3. Find a way to make gnome fit. One way would be to make it include
   only a subset of the gnome-desktop-environment task. (Full GNOME
   would still be downloaded from a mirror if a mirror was available.)
   Or try to trim back the recommends either in debian-cd or
   otherwise.
4. Find some other creative solution. For example, we could pack CD #1
   full of useful text-mode tools, recovery tools, net admin tools etc,
   and round it out with the top packages from popcon and make it a sysadmin
   dream CD.

(I think #1 is a pretty dreadful choice. Even on a moderatly fast
network, downloading all that stuff was going to use another hour
of my time this evening. If this happens we should IMHO deprecate use
the CD #1 in all documentation and recommend another CD or DVD.)

[a] http://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/squeeze_di_beta1/i386/iso-cd/debian-squeeze-di-beta1-i386-CD-1.iso
[b] http://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/squeeze_di_beta1/multi-arch/iso-cd/debian-squeeze-di-beta1-amd64-i386-powerpc-netinst.iso
[c] http://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/squeeze_di_beta1/i386/iso-cd/debian-squeeze-di-beta1-i386-kde-CD-1.iso
[d] http://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/squeeze_di_beta1/i386/iso-cd/debian-squeeze-di-beta1-i386-xfce+lxde-CD-1.iso

-- 
see shy jo
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