[indiana-discuss] CD Space analysis and recommendations

[James Cornell]

Depends on the compression used for the package, but the contrib  
pkgadd file (bzip2) is 13MB for the GTK+2 variant of Thunderbird  
2.0.0.16.  Unpacked and installed, somewhere around double that,  
26MB.  On Windows Thunderbird uses about 24.3MB unpacked/installed as  
well.

The only reason I can see Thunderbird was included in addition to  
Firefox would be past issues with IMAP handling, which have been fixed  
post GNOME 2.20.1, while we are now founding on 2.22.x+ on Nevada.   
The other less likely reason is the hype behind Firefox weighing in to  
prospect users who want to snatch and grab any Mozilla product because  
it's Mozilla.  Much like people don't care about redundant Google  
desktop apps, since hey, it's Google!

Evolution has a plugin architecture, and also supports LDAP, which is  
important to businesses.  There aren't any real critical add-ons that  
would tie someone to Thunderbird, unlike the situation of Firefox and  
Firebug for example.  Thunderbird too has support though limited in  
some areas with regards to LDAP since it's more self-contained, but  
for the audience this is not a real detriment as long as certain  
preparatory actions are made on the back-ends.  Update size could be  
another reason to drop it, since they insist on upgrading all of  
Thunderbird as a bundle, as opposed to Evolution, where a particular  
dependency that's comparable to what's bundled in Thunderbird can  
simply be upgraded without costing many users bandwidth.  It's  
unfortunate that the internet is expensive to run, and that most  
nations have to pay for every gigabyte, but for upgrading a few  
household computers a few times for our international users can be  
really annoying for something pitched as gratis and libre.  There's a  
cost to redundancy you can't have the whole cake, and usually the  
whole cake just annoys users and makes them confused anyway.

Cheers,
James
On Aug 10, 2008, at 3:56 AM, Chris Ridd wrote:

>
> On 9 Aug 2008, at 19:49, James Cornell wrote:
>
>> It meshes better with GNOME, and it has exchange 2000/2003 connectors
>> with current versions, 2007 very soon.  Theoretically it uses less
>> resources since it shares GNOME components, and I find it to be more
>> accessible from a business-minded workflow, as the contacts, calendar
>> and memos are better integrated.  Google support (webcal) is another
>> perk.  I argue the opposite, why Thunderbird?  No major player Linux
>> or
>> otherwise bundles Thunderbird or ticks it by default if the user is
>> using GNOME.  Thunderbird isn't like Firefox where there's an
>> immediate
>> dependence on rendering through gecko, or particular font needs, it's
>> e-mail, and e-mail doesn't depend on all the whiz bang things like a
>> browser does.  I find Thunderbird to be redundant, and a waste of
>> space
>> because it doubles the library requirements as most Mozilla programs
>> are
>> self-contained for management reasons, while I can still argue  
>> there's
>> nothing wrong with a client sharing GNOME resources since I've never
>> seen any installation of Evolution fail outright because of upgrades
>> and
>> the like.
>
> That's a reasonable argument too. As long as you could still install
> Thunderbird from pkg.opensolaris.org I'd be fine with dropping it from
> the CD. How much space would it save?
>
> Cheers,
>
> Chris
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