too many CD ISOs

[Matt Taggart <taggart@debian.org>]

Hi debian-cd,

With etch having 20+ CDROM sized ISOs per arch (plus businesscard, netinst, 
kde, and xfcd) I am beginning to be reminded of when I first started using 
Linux and installing required a huge stack of floppies :)

Now most people don't require the full set of CDs to install, I think we keep 
them around for folks that don't have a good internet connection AND don't 
have a DVD drive. And that definitely makes sense.... for etch.

DVD drives have been out for long enough that new drives are cheap, and you 
can probably find a used drive for only a few bucks (or free) if you don't 
want to buy new (even DVD writers are getting affordable). They are available 
in IDE/SCSI/sata/USB connection types, internal and external enclosures, and 
it probably possible to add one to machines of all the archs that Debian 
supports. In the rare cases it's not(and again, these are cases where there is 
ALSO no good internet connection), people can probably run a LAN cable to a 
nearby machine that can support a DVD drive and serve things up via http.

For the folks that these images are for, the ones far off the internet, I have 
no idea how many CD images lenny will require, but I bet the cost of that many 
CDs and shipping will be close enough to the cost of a DVD drive and the fewer 
amount of DVDs required. Or even shipping a cheap hard drive...

Also the CDs are sorted according to popularity. The interestingness of the CD 
images drops off very quickly after the the first few.

Costs of additional CD images:
* require additional cycles to generate (pretty cheap, but adds up as it's done
  a lot)
* storage to keep around (currently all the ISOs are 340+ gb IIRC, maybe 40% 
is the full CD set)
* bandwidth to provide (jidgo fixes this for people using it, but not everyone 
does)
* additional bandwidth/storage on mirrors
* requires additional torrent seeds

So how about keeping around a fixed amount of CD images per arch and dropping 
the rest? I was thinking 3-4, but it might be cool to keep the first DVD's 
worth of packages, so maybe that would be 7 CDs?
Hmm, we have the kde/xfce images too, I wonder if it would be possible to make 
each of those be unique beyond the base install and they could act as CD 2 and 
3 for each other?

Are there other reasons for keeping all the CD images around? If not, now is 
probably a good time to get rid of them.

Thanks,

-- 
Matt Taggart
taggart@debian.org