Re: Bug#612074: debian-cd: provide iso image aligned on usb thumb drive size

[Steve McIntyre <steve@einval.com>]

On Sat, Feb 05, 2011 at 02:29:23PM +0100, Yves-Alexis Perez wrote:
>Package: debian-cd
>Version: 3.1.5
>Severity: wishlist
>
>Hey,
>
>as discussed on #debian-cd, now that iso images are hybrid and
>installing via usb seems quite common, it'd be nice to have iso images
>for usb thumb drives.
>
>For example the first CD is around 650M which fits well on a CD but
>not an a 512M thumb drive and means you lose some place on a 1G one.
>Same goes for the first DVD which won't fit on a 4G drive and will lose
>quite some space on a 8G one (it seems there are 5G drive but it doesn't
>seem that frequent).
>
>I guess it might make sense to have images for 1G and 4G size. It'd
>be nice to have multi-arch stuff too, for example i386/amd64 CD1
>(which might fit on 1G), multi-arch DVD1 (which might fit on 8G).
>
>Anyway you see the point, and I know adding more and more images aren't
>viable (not sure if there are current one which can be dropped too).

For now, I've added code to debian-cd to allow for configuration to
specify use of a specified disk type (i.e. size), but then to
over-ride the size for *all* the images (as I did for the KDE CDs for
squeeze), and/or a single specific image number.

Then I'm going to make DVD#1 limit to 4GB for amd64, i386 and the
amd64/i386 m-a DVD. Then it'll fit on a 4GB stick too, and I think
that's useful. The rest of the set will still fill up to the normal
4.7GB DVD size, as there's no point to keeping to that limit on later
discs. Other arches and source DVDs will also not be affected -
there's also no point messing with them AFAICS. Please correct me if
you think I'm wrong here!

For a 1GB or 2GB (or even 8GB/16GB) image, we *can* add more builds
targetted to fit those sizes, but I would rather make those be totally
separate builds; they're not close enough to any of the current
standard sizes that we generate IMHO.

Thoughts?

-- 
Steve McIntyre, Cambridge, UK.                                steve@einval.com
"Every time you use Tcl, God kills a kitten." -- Malcolm Ray