tailoring installs?

[Dushan Mitrovich]

A couple of days ago I installed the plotting program 'gri'.  I needed a 
small, simple plotting program for simple tasks, and this looked from 
its website as a good candidate to try out.  It installed okay - after 
over _five_ uninterrupted hours.  My DSL connection is slow - 256k - but 
still, this struck me as ridiculous.  Included in the install were a 
bunch of languages beside English, none of which I needed or wanted.

Before the install I had no idea how much was going to be installed, and 
even at the beginning of the install the list of dependencies didn't 
give a sense of the volume of files involved.  So my question is: Is 
there a way to get that information before the install, and then tailor 
the install itself to not include pieces that are not needed?

For example, if the install preview included this (from memory - 
representative only):
     ....
     textlive-lang-checkoslovak   2.1 MB
     textlive-lang-polish            1.9 MB
     textlive-lang-french           2.4 MB
     textlive-lang-spanish          3.2 MB
     textlive-lang-norsk            2.0 MB
     textlive-lang-ukenglish        2.5 MB
     ....
and options to not include them, it would have shortened the install and 
saved on hard-disk space.

I don't know how easy or even possible something like this would be, but 
I thought it worth asking.

- Dushan Mitrovich