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RE: the future of the netinst image



> http://www.debian.org/CD/netinst/

"A network install or netinst CD is a single CD which enables you to install the entire operating system. This single CD contains just the minimal amount of software to start the installation and fetch the remaining packages over the Internet."

This is clearly not what the "netinst" CD contains. A minimal ammount of software to start the installer and get cd and networking up is under 5 floppies worth (proven by the fact that you offer such floppies for download) for i386, a bit more for some other platforms. the "netinst" CD on the other hand is much much bigger.

the information further down the page is a bit more accurate but it still contains many issues. For example it compares the "netinst" to the full cd set but does not mention that you can use just CD1 of the full CD set and that doing so has distinct advantages for systems with awkward network setups.

imo netinst falls uncomforablly between too stools. for those who want to install everything over the network and have a nice network setup floppies are a nicer option because you can remove them without disturbing the installation after a relatively short read process (i don't know if you can do this with buisnesscard or miniiso but i'm pretty sure you can't do it with netinst or full CD 1 since they will want to install the base system off the CD later). For those with awkward network setups full CD 1 is a much better option, especially as debians support for installing packages over a sneakernet is so terrible. 
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