netinst, businesscard, and media sizes

[Matt Taggart <taggart@debian.org>]

Hi debian-cd,

I just noticed something about the current ISO images and I thought I would 
mention it. I was looking at ISO sizes in relation to available media sizes. 
In addition to DVD and CD, another common media type is 80mm mini-CDs

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mini_CD

these hold either 210mb or 185mb (I'm not sure if this is the usable size, it 
might be something slightly smaller). I have some Memorex "Pocket CD-RW" of 
this size and they are 185mb, but I was able to find CD-R and CD-RW from 
185-210 available for sale online.

I have been told (by Steve Langasek) that the netinst image sizes are 
"whatever it takes to do net install, to be used on a regular CD but kept as 
small as possible for download purposes".  The netinst images are all pretty 
close to the 185mb mini-CD size,

arch    size   free space on a 185mb disk
=========================================
arm:    136mb    49mb
sparc:  138mb    47mb
amd64:  145mb    40mb
i386:   159mb    26mb
alpha:  162mb    23mb
hppa:   162mb    23mb
mips:   168mb    17mb
mipsel: 170mb    15mb
ia64:   212mb   -27mb
ppc:    234mb   -49mb

Only ia64 and powerpc are over that size which is good, that means that most 
of the current netinst images are usable on miniCDs, if not optimal. But 
there's also some opportunity to squeeze a little more on there for most of 
the archs. Getting the ia64 and powerpc below 185mb would be good, making use 
of the extra space on the other archs would be a bonus.

I also looked at the Business Card media format. The above URL claims that 
this format ranges from 30-100mb but nearly everything I found was 50mb (I did 
find a single 45mb type). I think it's safe to optimimize for 50mb for the 
businesscard images. Here's the current size,

arch    size   free space on a 50mb disk
========================================
arm:     20mb   30mb
alpha:   25mb   25mb
sparc:   25mb   25mb
hppa:    31mb   19mb
i386:    33mb   17mb
amd64:   34mb   16mb
mipsel:  35mb   15mb
mips:    36mb   14mb
ia64:    55mb   -5mb
ppc:     70mb  -20mb

Again ia64 and powerpc need to lose a little and the rest have some room to 
play with.

In addition to trying to make better use of the space, some other ideas 
occurred to me:

1) could you make multi-arch businesscards of i386 and amd64?
2) could you make multi-arch mini-CDs of i386/amd64/ppc by combining
   their businesscard images?


Should any of the above turn into wishlist bugs? If so, filed against what?

Thanks,

-- 
Matt Taggart
taggart@debian.org