On Thursday 19 April 2007 02:22, Joey Hess wrote: > The mini CD size is the primary target of the netinst. A secondary > target is putting the netinst on a hd-media usb stick. We were not able > to keep it fitting on a 128 mb stick for etch, so the current target > there is 256 mb, of which ~245 mb is available for the netinst. A tertiary target IMHO is to keep the download size down as much as possible given the installations methods the two variants support (which IMO is the real primairy goal): - businesscard: contains only boot support and installer components - netinst: additionally contains what's needed to install a base system This basic "installation method" goal also explains why some images are bigger than the target size: those arches either have a huge number of kernels and initrds, or just huge binaries. This is unfortunate, but Filling up the space to the target size is IMO not a target. > IMHO the best use of the space for i386 would be including a full set > of the kernels d-i can install on there, instead of only the 486 and > 686 kernels. That would fix one of the current hidden problems of using > the netinst, that you may not get the ideal optimised kernel. True, that would be an option. Do you only mean the k7 kernel, or also the 64-bits kernel, or even the xen/vserver kernels? OTOH, we already do install a good working kernel with the netinst (at least, now that the bug where we installed a 486 instead of a 686 kernel on k6/k7 hardware is fixed) and changing a kernel after installation is relatively straightforward. This has to be weighed against the increased download size.
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