Several points here...
Is having 6 cd's bloat, or is having a minimum installation footprint of 600M bloat?
Is a forced installation of
sendmail bloat on a machine
that will never be an e-mail server? Is it bloat to make the
print spooler (and thus
ghostscript) a dependancy to multiple
packages that are merely able to print, but dont require it
(especially when the user owns no printer)?
Is it bloat to include multiple packages of the same
purpose (KDE vs. Gnome, sendmail vs. exim, bison vs. yacc, shell fun such as ksh zsh bash tcsh ash sash), or is that
just including a wide set of flavors for users? I've always thought the large variety of choices is one of the things that makes Linux fun to use.
Perhaps it is bloat to include the source. (Ok, so it's a legal requirement. Does that make it not bloat?)
background installation is cool
I'd like to see the installer do more stuff in the background. Wouldn't it be neat if it could actually start installing packages before you are done selecting them all?
Perhaps it could install the required base packages while
you are choosing the rest.
Of course, while this would be very neat, it isn't really
possible on small memory machines, and on high end machines, the whole install typically takes less than 5 minutes anyway, so perhaps it's just silly. I still think it'd be
a cute trick.
automatic compilation during installation
lj points out that source is larger than binary.
On the surface, this is true; however, many of the binaries
legally require the source to be included--so if you include one, you have to include both anyway. Is the source still larger?
Also, when you say the binaries are smaller, are you considering the binaries for every architecture, or just your favorite one? Wouldn't it be cool to have a distribution with minimal binaries for every architecture,
and then source, and an automated complilation process for the rest?
Of course, this wouldn't work for packages that can't have
their compilation process automated, but then, I don't think
this really applies to most things that have rpm's.
As to the CD whirring all night or the HD being full,
the obvious solution to this is to copy the source you need
from the cdrom, compile it, and delete it before going to the next package. I don't think this would be a big deal or a significant performance penalty.
The argument for instant usability and slowness on many machines is a very good point. It costs less than a dollar to produce and mail two cdrom's anyway, so what's the savings?