don't ship .bmp files but rather .png

First and foremost, thanks for helping make Ubuntu better by recommending a change for the benefit of our users!

This should not be marked as critical as a critical importance is reserved for:
Critical: A bug which has a severe impact on a large portion of Ubuntu users

I am requesting the importance here be changed to wishlist as this is a feature request, albeit a very helpful one. Wishlist importance incorporates the following 'bugs':

Wishlist: a request to add a new feature to one of the programs in Ubuntu.
    * These aren't always bugs, but can be ideas for new features which do not yet exist.
    * These can also be requests to have software packaged for Ubuntu.

Again, thanks for your valuable input!

Thanks for explaining this to me, however please note that I'm the unity and nux maintainer. If the image isn't stripped down to png, then unity won't fit in the CD for Alpha1 and then, won't be by default in Natty, hence the fact it's critical :)

A PNG mapping would be very sensible there, I think we can agree it's
High importance now, until we get to B1 when it would become critical :-)

can set it to high instead of critical, but I hope we will still have some space on the CD to put them :)

To allay some fears and misconceptions with regards to the CD, these files actually compress better by being stored as uncompressed and therefore bzip2/lzma being able to use combined compression. Regardless of the compression method is combined-generic (deflate, bzip2, lzma) or the per-file domain-specific (png pre-processors + deflate) the sizes are all in the range between 4 kilobytes and 6 kilobytes.

Of course, the raw uncompressed BMP inclusion makes a two-megabyte difference to an /installed/ system (which is a 1% difference on a Netbook flash drive), but the issue is not as simple as the title implies. On a wider note I would question:

  1. Why are the bitmaps being shipped, not dynamically rendered
  2. Why are they rendered from Tahoma rather than a fully libre font

So, on the CDs and the .debs, it's irrelevant, but it *does* make an installed footprint difference.

Well, it's still 1 more MB in the RAM on the livecd, so not negligible on the RAM and not only on hard drive…

(I speaking about the live session there)

The reason the bmp file are there in the first place was convenience. It was easy to use a precomputed font texture to render text with the OpenGL. The tahoma font was as good as any. And until a few month ago, I never thought that nux would be integrated into Ubuntu!
Now, the plan is to remove the bmp font files entirely and use pango and cairo internally. In the meantime, I am switching the format from bmp to png. Each bmp files gets its size reduced from 512K to 7k.

This bug was fixed in the package nux - 0.9.8-0ubuntu1

---------------
nux (0.9.8-0ubuntu1) natty; urgency=low

  * New upstream release + cherry pick latest commit:
    - don't ship .bmp files but rather .png (LP: #678460)
    - Clicks outside of Quicklist don't close it (LP: #683079)
  * debian/rules:
    - bump shlibs for new release
 -- Didier Roche <email address hidden> Tue, 30 Nov 2010 17:32:33 +0100