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Re: What CDs and DVDs should we produce for lenny?

Hello!
First of all i have to admit i'm just a simple user, so i might have a very limited view of the problem. 


Steve McIntyre schrieb:

[ Please note Reply-To: to debian-cd... ]

Hi folks,

It's time for me to ask the question again - what CDs and DVDs will we
find useful enough that we should make them for lenny? The reason I'm
asking is that we're looking at a *huge* number of discs, and it's not
clear that they'll all be useful. I've just finished building the full
set for lenny d-i beta 1 (hence why I've been so quiet the last few
days), and what we're looking at *now* is quite scary:

 2 small CDs per arch (business card, netinst)
 ~30 CDs per arch for a full CD set
 ~4 DVDs per arch for a full DVD set
 (total 353 CDs, 51 DVDs, 426 GB)

Things are only going to get bigger: we're about to add armel to the
mix, and I'm expecting that we're going to grow further yet in terms
of the number and sizes of packages before we release lenny. That
leaves us with a huge amount of data for us to build and host, and for
our mirrors to handle too. So...

 1. Is it worth making full sets of CDs at all? Can we rely on people
    having a net connection or being able to use DVDs if they want
    *everything*?
I once installed "Sarge" from CD and it was a real pain, it takes you many many hours sitting in front of your machine and changing disks. As the number of CDs has increased since that time, i think it is not very practicable way installing a full blown Debian from CDs.
Another point is, that one can assume that a machine not having a DVD drive will not be able to handle more than a very basic OS, but this is provided with the first few CDs. 


 2. Is it worth producing all the CDs/DVDs/whatever for all the
    architectures?
I would provide jigdos and maybe torrents for everything, but not the complete ISOs. 
 3. For some arches, should we just provide the first couple of CDs
    and a full set of DVDs? This is a bit of a compromise option - if
    a given machine will not boot from DVD, but can boot from CD and
    get the rest of its packages from a network share then all's good.
I think offering only the first DVD as ISO will give everyone a nice start. A compareable set of CD ISOs for those who need CDs. From this point on everyone can get the packages from the mirrors or the images by jigdo or torrent. I think doing so for ALL archs will cut down the needed space (and traffic) a lot. 
 4. ??? - what else would be a sane option?

Suggestions/comments/complaints - please let us know what you'd
prefer.
I think no user will have a problem getting the images by jigdo or torrent, or installing the rest from the mirrors. But of course a special set of tools must be included with the first DVD (or the set of CDs), so that jigdo and torrents can be handled even by new users - maybe installed together with the base system. I think of something like: klick on the .torrent link on the Debian site (or even on some kind of readme.html placed on the Desktop by default) and a torrent manager starts up. No special knowledge is necessary therefor.
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