Karl Goetz schrieb:
On Mon, 2008-03-17 at 12:29 +0100, JÃŒrgen Kertz wrote: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.Me too :)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)Can i say here, that is a very impressive number.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.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*?Etch only requires one cd to install. IIRC Sarge required 3? I hopefully Lenny will continue to provide a once cd required (plus others for fancy stuff). How practical a "full blown Debian" install is depends on what is in your full blown installs :)
I'm aware of the 1-CD-installation, but lets just say here I need a lot of fancy stuff which has lots of dependencies spread across almost all discs.
To summarize here: i just wanted to state that I personally find jigdo and torrent more useful than complete ISO images. Especially jigdo: it saves me and the rest of the world a lot of bandwith and harddisk space. So my Idea is to provide a "Starter Kit" of ISO images (DVD and CD), that can be downloaded as usual (and independent of the OS), and the additional "fancy stuff" is availabe via jigdo (or torrent).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.Not necesarily. Of the 4 computers i have handy, one has a dvd drive, and thats broken. Three are P4 systems, one is P3 (so their well and truely capable of a full OS). Low cost (recycled/donated) computers wont nesesarily have dvd drives either. While it costs ~AUD$30 (here in the 1st world) for a dvd drive here, in Papua New Guinea (the 3rd world) its considerably more costly. For example: The Goroka General Hospital (highlands of PNG) has ~60 desktop computers. There is aproximately 5 dvd drives in that batch, of which 2 are known to work. Yes, thats two systems that can be used to rip the dvd set onto the local mirror (which could be done), but theres no guarantee the drives will keep reading dvds. In my experiance even when a drive stops reading dvds it will keep reading cdroms for some time after.I would provide jigdos and maybe torrents for everything, but not the complete ISOs.2. Is it worth producing all the CDs/DVDs/whatever for all the architectures?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.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.no, "everyone" can not. (see below).I think doing so for ALL archs will cut down the needed space (and traffic) a lot.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 a4. ??? - what else would be a sane option? Suggestions/comments/complaints - please let us know what you'd prefer.Your making a fairly classic assumption: That bandwidth is cheap everyware. In Europe and the USA that may be the case, but its not universal. Australia (1st world) has relatively expensive internet connectivity, and Papua New Guinea (3rd world) has *very* expensive connectivity. When your internet connection is 600mb of traffic a month (both directions counted on that figure), you dont download isos from an internet mirror if humanly posible. kk
If someone has a slow and/or expensive or limited internet connection, none of the discussed options will help you, no matter if the mentioned 426 GB are offered or just a selected subset.