Re: Still no base tarball
On Wed, 22 Aug 2001, Ethan Benson wrote:
> nobody has yet provided a convincing argument for putting the
> tarball on the CDs.
While my only requirement has been to have them in the archives, it would
be useful to have it on the CD as well. Here's why:
Of the machines that I get a chance to install Debian on, over half of
them will not boot from a CD and 25% don't even have a CD-ROM drive. For
most of those that will not boot from the CD, a .deb archives on the CD is
sufficient, as long as I have boot, root, and drivers disks, but even
then, I've had problems making the CD-ROM drive work with existing drivers
(most notibly some of the Creative Labs sound blaster cards, as each minor
hardware release is markedly different.)
So I'd say about 30% of machines I see need the whole base install done
from floppies. Now, I agree that I am completely able to download the
tarball and split it up onto floppies, but that is not true of everyone,
and folks are going to be pretty disapointed if they buy a CD and find
there isn't enough there to install the base system on their piece-of-junk
machine.
It would be very nice to have on the CD for these folks, but I'm not as
tied into this idea as I am for the need to have this tarball in the
archives. In any case, I would only suggest that the disk images for base
be provided on the CD and not the tarball as that is the actual use this
is likely to be put to.
The question I would ask is this: What important component will not fit on
the first CD if basedebs.tar.gz is included? Are we really going to loose
something of greater importance by doing this? 24 meg is about 3% of the
CD.
Looking for the most flexibility,
Dwarf
--
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