Re: Another about SID in ftp.fsn.hu/pub/CDROM-Images/debian-unofficial/sid/jigdo/
On Wed, 15 Dec 2004, Attila Nagy wrote:
> Santiago Vila wrote:
> > not necessarily mean people benefit from them. The CDs might contain
> > packages with very serious bugs, and people might well throw the CD to
> > the bin immediately. You think you are helping by making the CDs available.
>
> That's what rewritable media is for!
Sure. I love rewritable media. I still have some CD-RWs here with
labels like "woody ftp.fsn.hu 2002-05-29". See, I have used CD images
distributed by you for woody, so I'm glad that they did exist.
But they were images for testing. For unstable, even using rewritable
media, it could result in a lot of wasted bandwidth anyway. I wonder
how many people download a sid CD just to discover that it's unusable
as an install disk.
> You can kill somebody with a knife, but also help you to survive in
> the jungle and eat some meat :)
Hmm, I don't know what analogy would be best here.
Maybe sarge == knife, sid == the jungle :-)
> > If you spend money and time to distribute them, that's another reason
> > why I think you should consider stopping the distribution of sid CDs.
>
> That's a little bit hard.
It was not my intention. I was just pointing out the apparent contradiction
between "This is the only way I can do that, so I build the CDs.
If somebody else can benefit from them, I am happy." and "the people
who spend money and time to distribute them".
I thank you for the testing CDs. I am not so happy with the sid CDs.
If you spend money and time to distribute them, I would concentrate
on testing CDs.
> If everybody would think like you, there were no open source community.
Thanks for saying that, because I prefer the term "free software" :-)
> Just for the record:
> >>There were nearly 5000 SID and more than 60000 Sarge image downloads
>
> Last week there were only 400 Woody downloads. Should I draw the
> consequences?
You probably mean "sid CDs are more interesting than woody CDs".
What I see is that sarge is the most interesting distribution to
install on new systems.
> > I have a question for you: Why do you think the Debian FAQ says
> > "please do not distribute CDs of unreleased software", and why
> > do you think such thing does not apply to you?
> 1. I didn't read that FAQ (where is it?)
It should be in the doc-debian package.
> 2. FAQ was Frequently Asked Questions last time I checked and not a license
> agreement which I must agree if I read it.
Agreed. I've already said that this is not a license issue but a matter
of respect for a work which is unfinished.
> 3. mirrors, please stop distributing Sarge CDs.
I do not object to people distributing sarge CDs. In some sense it's
"our" fault that sarge isn't stable yet, and sarge is the thing
which is closest to the next stable.
As sarge is supposed to be an always releaseable distribution, I can't
honestly complain that people distribute sarge CDs. Any brown paper
bag bug in a sarge CD is usually not too much brown. Otherwise it
would have been fixed in unstable instead of propagating to testing.
> 4. should I continue?
Hmm, is that a rethorical question?
> 5. OK, just one more: a SID CD is full of with released software. I don't
> think Debian has too much software without version number (from CVS for
> example)...
> If I take a look at the number of packages in SID (enormous number) and the
> amount of work needed to correctly write and package it, I think a SID CD has
> a lot of manpower in it which was needed to actually create the software (I
> guess it's minimum 95, or more percents) and a minimal amount of time to make
> a .deb from it.
Well, yes, sid is a collection of "released" software, but it's just
"individually" released, not "released as a whole", except for the
fact that it's what you get when you point your sources.list to sid.
Consider the debian distributions as food. sid would be something
like "not for human consumption".
> > This is of course not a matter of licensing, as the packages are all
> > free software, but a matter of respect for a work which is not finished.
>
> Look. Our foundation have a very low budget (my salary minus the
> regular expenses to maintain my life. Take your salary's 10%,
> because it's Hungary...), so it is possible that we will run out of
> diskspace in one of our servers and abandon those images. Those will
> be the first, I promise.
> [...]
Thank you :-)
If such happens, I hope/expect there will be enough fun with sarge and
etch CDs (after the release of sarge as stable) to bother with sid again.
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