Re: Patch for small cd images and producing them officially?

[jason andrade <jason@dstc.edu.au>]

On 20 Dec 2002, Tollef Fog Heen wrote:

> Cool, this will _finally_ make it possible for us to have official
> netinst images.  They've been missed.

yay.  it also means i guess that some of us don't have to maintain
multiple separate mirrors for netinst images now..

current /pub/debian-netinst/

drwxr-xr-x    3 mirror   mirror       4096 Jan 22  2002 elf
drwxr-xr-x    2 mirror   mirror       4096 Jul 25 07:49 heanet
drwxr-sr-x    3 mirror   mirror       4096 Jun 27 14:16 ieure
drwxr-xr-x    3 mirror   mirror       4096 Dec  3 08:35 steve

> | First of all, what do we want to build, the smaller ones 45 Mb right now,
> | or the installable from cd ones, 83 Mb.
>
> Why not both?

frankly i don't see the point in the proliferation of different ISO formats
from a mirror point of view.  i'd prefer to see official debian cd images as:

o a single "lightweight" netinst iso per architecture

	- allows end users to get a base debian install up and grab further
	  stuff from their closest mirror

o a single "complete" full set per architecture.

	- allows cd production people, user groups and users to get a
	  complete debian project on cd.

it appears there is enough demand for an "upgrade" set of ISO images though
i am hoping this might be a single ISO per architecture at most.  if it is
more than one ISO then the usefulness of an upgrade ISO seems to be reduced
to me.

while jigdo appears to be gaining in use, from the feedback i've personally
received (as an ISO mirror) and from this list there appears to be a solid
demand to continue to produce official iso images and make them available
for download via FTP/HTTP/RSYNC.


i'm not qualified to comment on the cd creation process etc - this is just
some observations as a mirror maintainer try to deal with disk space
requirements as debian grows.

3.0_r0 is already > 20G of disk.

i imagine 3.0_r1 is going to be > 25G once you start looking at an
update iso per architecture, netinst iso per architecture..

we usually try and keep at least one complete revision of iso images
from a previous release but it appears we won't be able to do that
with the upcoming 3.0r1 release :-/

regards,

-jason