I think the traditional answer to this question is that disk space is cheap, and the one off bandwidth cost is not vast -- but perhaps you disagree.

If MW does go down this route I think the right balance is to have a limited languages (top 12 perhaps) tarball rather than just English -- or have limited-lang as the default, and additional languages as an extra install. Unfortunately afaik we do not have a good GUI for pulling in additional language packs (particularly if we want that GUI to come with its own translations!).

I could see _why_ it is currently as it is now, so I'm just wondering if it is possible to add a lightweight version of the bundle.

or maybe a simple script which can remove all but the default language after install. (with potentially a secondary service to download user-selected languages if/when they chose to use them?)

Why not have a prepackaging downloader that you can tell which:

• release
• languages
• skins
• extensions

you want?

Shaky connectons, small bandwidths, and download times are of concern in some regions of the world.

We have enough problems in keeping command line and web installers in sync, having additional variants will be a disaster unless there is a dedicate team to maintain this. Having said that there is a quite reasonable request in T43896 that affects installation in a constrained environment.

On 1.30.0:

196M	.
56M	languages/i18n/
4.1M	includes/api/i18n/
3.4M	includes/installer/i18n/

So 32% of the bundle is i18n messages. Given that strong internationalization is one of MediaWiki's principles, I'd be inclined to decline this request.