Re: What CDs and DVDs should we produce for lenny?
On Sun, Mar 16, 2008 at 11:59:52PM +0000, Steve McIntyre wrote:
> 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)
Wow, that are impressive numbers. I can hardly imagine anyone burning 30
CDs. Imagine the time and effort that would take to burn them. And the
poor administrator who would have to DJ them during installation.
Reminds of the good old Slackware times where 50 floppies were needed to
install it and disk number 48 was damaged. :) And even with slim cases
that would occupy two levels on a CD rack. Waste of resources.
4 DVDs sounds rather reasonable since recordable media has become pretty
cheap. At least way cheaper than 30 CD recordables. I would appreciate a
net install CD for "older" servers that do not have a DVD-ROM drive
though. But otherwise I'd say let's focus on DVDs. Blueray is surely not
an option yet.
> 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*?
In my personal experience there are only few cases where people need a
full-blown Debian on a system without a network connection. One case is
a user with a low-bandwith internet connection who burns the media at
work. And another case is putting up a system in a secure network area
where no internet access is permitted. But these special cases can
probably easily be handled with DVDs.
> 2. Is it worth producing all the CDs/DVDs/whatever for all the
> architectures?
I would arrogantly not bother creating 30 CDs.
> 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.
Sounds good. Perhaps the number of CDs that it would take to install a
basic KDE/Gnome system without loading too much from the internet.
Thanks for your work.
Christoph
--
email@christoph-haas.de www.workaround.org JID: chrish@jabber.workaround.org
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