Re: What CDs and DVDs should we produce for lenny?
On 2008-03-16 23:59:52 (+0000), Steve McIntyre <steve@einval.com> wrote:
> [ Please note Reply-To: to debian-cd... ]
>
> Hi folks,
>
> It's time for me to ask the question again - what CDs and DVDs will we
> find useful enough that we should make them for lenny? The reason I'm
> asking is that we're looking at a *huge* number of discs, and it's not
> clear that they'll all be useful. I've just finished building the full
> set for lenny d-i beta 1 (hence why I've been so quiet the last few
> days), and what we're looking at *now* is quite scary:
>
> 2 small CDs per arch (business card, netinst)
> ~30 CDs per arch for a full CD set
> ~4 DVDs per arch for a full DVD set
> (total 353 CDs, 51 DVDs, 426 GB)
>
> Things are only going to get bigger: we're about to add armel to the
> mix, and I'm expecting that we're going to grow further yet in terms
> of the number and sizes of packages before we release lenny. That
> leaves us with a huge amount of data for us to build and host, and for
> our mirrors to handle too. So...
>
> 1. Is it worth making full sets of CDs at all? Can we rely on people
> having a net connection or being able to use DVDs if they want
> *everything*?
>
> 2. Is it worth producing all the CDs/DVDs/whatever for all the
> architectures?
>
> 3. For some arches, should we just provide the first couple of CDs
> and a full set of DVDs? This is a bit of a compromise option - if
> a given machine will not boot from DVD, but can boot from CD and
> get the rest of its packages from a network share then all's good.
>
> 4. ??? - what else would be a sane option?
>
Considering that modern machines can boot from network or USB stick,
some machine classes lack optical drives (small laptops, many non
ia32/amd64/ppc machines), DVD readers are uncommon outside the
ia32/amd64/ppc world, optical media are slow compared to network or USB
sticks, I would say the importance of optical media images is low. It's
cool to have CDs or DVDs to give away at fairs etc, but for practical
use much better installation methods (network and USB stick) are available IMO.
So in practice this means we can suffice with business card CD images
for ia32/amd64/ppc and CDs (maybe DVDs) with the most important stuff.
For other archs I see no use of having CD or DVD images.
Cheers,
Peter.
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