Bug#334452: debian-cd: Debian-cd website offers binaries but not sources, violating GPL
> But you are right that we should add links to the source images there.
> I've done that for most of the cases.
Thank you!
> I don't see how the CD/DVD images help you with getting source code that
> isn't available on the the mirrors.
Jigdo depends on the mirrors, but I can get an image via BitTorrent,
which doesn't depend on the mirrors. I can even combine the two methods,
getting as much or as little as I want with jigdo, then using BitTorrent
to fill in the remaining parts of the image. BT is smart that way.
> For the stable release, the source code doesn't disappear from the mirrors...
Part of the reason I filed this bug report is because many of the
source code packages needed by the sarge-src-*.jigdo files that I
downloaded in May aren't available any more. Perhaps they weren't
"official" or stable releases; I don't recall any more exactly where
they came from. Their timestamps are all 2005-05-06 after 02:00.
Hmm, unpacking the -1 jigdo file reveals:
ShortInfo='Debian GNU/Linux testing "Sarge" - Official Snapshot Source-1'
Info='Generated on Fri, 06 May 2005 11:09:30 +0200'
So it's official but it's not stable. Diffing it with the stable ones
that I just downloaded via your new "source" link reveals that a small
number of packages were revised.
I've started working from the current official stable stuff now.
> You might also be interested in snapshot.debian.net. They already do
> such archiving.
Snapshot.debian.net is very nice! Thank you for suggesting it. I'm
surprised that I never saw a pointer from www.debian.org to it. (A
search reveals that it's only mentioned in the Debian Weekly News, and
in the Quick Reference manual; could it be linked from Getting Debian,
or Debian Packages?)
I've downloaded the first and third source DVDs with jigdo, and have
created (from that) the first six source CDs. I'm seeding them
on BitTorrent, though at the moment nobody is downloading them.
I'll keep them in my BT server for the indefinite future.
I tried downloading the last 3% of the source-15.iso CD using BitTorrent.
There are two sites serving it up; I'm getting it at 0 to 1 kbytes/sec.
Adding my site to the set of source CD BT servers will probably help others,
though I can see from the tracker at http://bttracker.acc.umu.se:6969/
that BT's real win is for the i386 and amd64 binary CDs and DVDs where
five to dozens are seeding, and dozens to hundreds are downloading at once.
Who should I talk with about offering BitTorrent access to the DVD
source images? It's more convenient to handle three files instead of
fifteen, and it's hard to buy a CD writer that doesn't burn DVDs now.
I'm willing to seed them from my T1, like the CDs, though of course
they should also be seeded by others for reliability and bandwidth.
John Gilmore
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