Re: Ideas
On Sat, 3 Jul 1999, John Pearson wrote:
>> This scheme would mean people having to maintain *eight* different and
>> incompatible CDs - count them. This is a nightmare for people trying to
>> sell Debian CDs, and an even worse one for people mirroring the images.
>
>If binary disc 1 has the same packages in each case (and so on) I can't
>really see the issue. People will *see* the non-free/non-US packages, but
>if they know they aren't included they shouldn't be very surprised if they
>can't install them; if CD 1 contains all the packages required by the
>standard profiles, they need never know the difference as they will never
>see a packages list, if they choose a profile and follow the instructions.
I'd rather not get to the situation where users are complaining about
error messages from dpkg/dselect/apt. It's bad enough at the moment, but
people will at least get consistent systems installed with the current
even if they don't see/read the instructions.
>>From the number of queries that turn up on the mailing lists, it seems that
>>at least some people really do have difficulty with the current
>>arrangement;
>are you sure that including a full Packages.cd on each one would cause more
>problems for end users than it solves?
I'm fairly convinced of that, yes.
>> What we need is a better CD-ROM interface that asks the user to feed all
>> their CDs in in turn and remembers the different Packages files from
>each.
>> This is clearly the best way to do things IMHO. If I understand his code
>> at all, this appears to be what Heiko is doing with dpkg-multicd V2. And
>> IIRC it's what Jason is programming apt-cdrom to do also. Then we can get
>> away from the problems I've detailed here with multiple CDs. It also gives
>> us more freedom to do what some people have been pushing for for some time
>> now - producing a core CD and splitting the other packages off onto extra
>> CDs organised by section/priority/vendor interest. Debian is getting too
>> big for much else...
>
>I include apt_0.3.7 compiled for slink on my CDs, and apt-cdrom seems to
>sort everything out nicely. Perhaps a newish apt could be added to
>proposed-updates? Apt-cdrom seems such a natural fit for slink CDs...
Agreed, and now Jason has done some more work on the disk-swapping stuff
it may be perfect. I need to check that out...
--
Steve McIntyre, Allstor Software smcintyr@allstor-sw.co.uk
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