Re: sunsite.org.uk - rsync access to cd-images
"J.A. Bezemer" <costar@panic.et.tudelft.nl> wrote:
> Hmmm... I think the end user's problem is disk-space. And they won't know just
> what to download -- Debian is biiig. Besides, there are no symlinks in WinXX
> so binary-all stuff is doomed to go wrong. (I'm talking about users switching
> from WinXX to Debian.) So instead of downloading the archive that they don't
> understand and that won't fit on their discs once Debian is installed, they
> download the CD images. Everyone knows how to burn a CD ;-)
That's the problem. People think they must download the CD when in actual
fact they can get away with a few files out of the disks-<arch> directory, and
then use APT to drag the rest down once they have Debian running.
For these people, rsync is no better than ftp, because they still need to
download all the data on the CD one way or another, and at least there is a
chance of them being familiar with FTP or HTTP, so rsync is actually worse.
First time installers should be strongly discouraged from grabbing CDs IMO,
with the only valid reason for them doing so being that they have cheap/easy
bandwidth on the CD burner machine, but not on the target machine(s).
Debian newbies just don't know how marvelous APT is, and so assume that they
must have a CD to install Debian. We're not doing them any favours by making
it easier to grab the CD images.
The people that would benefit from an easy archive-->rsync-->CD setup would
mostly be people that already have a mirror of the ftp archive anyway, and
they are not likely to be newbies. The only non-debianites that will be doing
this are CD vendors, I'd guess, so I'd expect them to be fairly au fait with
this sort of thing.
> So if you think a bit, it's probably understandable that there are vast
> numbers of users/distributors who are downloading entire images by FTP. This
> means an enormous load on the very few CD image mirrors. If we could offer
> those people a method that lightens this load and is also faster (far more
> _package_ servers are available), they might refrain from using FTP to a
> server on the other side of the world.
I doubt it.
[ Sorry, just being cynical ;-) ]
It would certainly be nice to have some sort of:
grab-CD <image name> <ftp_mirror_URL> <CD_mirror_URL>
script, and if it could work on non-Linux systems (be they Unix or Windows), that would be even better.
Cheers, Phil.
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