Re: why not full CD/DVD images on cdimage.d.o?

[Mateusz Poszwa <old4@o2.pl>]

On Tue, 14 May 2013 22:37:56 +0200
Mateusz Poszwa <old4@o2.pl> wrote:

> On Tue, 14 May 2013 15:33:53 +0100
> Steve McIntyre <steve@einval.com> wrote:
> 
> > On Sun, May 12, 2013 at 05:03:04PM +0200, Mateusz Poszwa wrote:
> > >On Sun, 12 May 2013 20:35:51 +0900
> > >Hideki Yamane <henrich@debian.or.jp> wrote:
> > >
> > >> Hi,
> > >> 
> > >>  During Tokyo Debian meeting on Saturday, one participant asked 
> > >>  "why there's less DVD images on cdimage.d.o than MD5SUMS files?"
> > >> 
> > >>  Probably this would be to reduce unnecessary download, but
> > >>  is there any information for this? (just curious)
> > >> 
> > >
> > >Hello.
> > >
> > >This is a (very, very) frequently asked question:
> > >
> > >http://www.debian.org/CD/faq/#not-all-images
> > >
> > >Other disc images are meant to be downloaded/assembled with jigdo.
> > 
> > Absolutely, yes.
> > 
> > >Best regards.
> > >
> > >PS: By the way… I am thinking about launching a server which would
> > >provide images absent on the main mirror (as well as some archival
> > >ones). Is it desirable?
> > 
> > /me should really finish off jigdoofus to make this easy...
> > 
> 
> I may have worded it badly… I'm sorry.
> I should've said s/server/service/. I already had JigdoFUSE working
> (being able to assemble images correctly, though not very efficiently)
> by the time I discovered jigdoofus. The problem is I only have
> FTP access to a free server without ability to mount filesystems now.
> I could host the service at home, but my uplink would not suffice
> for that purpose. I could also rent another server (VPS?),
> but I don't know if it is worth to.
> 
> I have other ideas though. In a world closer to perfect,
> users would just use jigdo to get Debian. In the real world
> though, they usually don't bother to install a separate program
> just to get an image. They may already have a BitTorrent client,
> but I presume not all images are seeded. For BitTorrent there is
> BitLet – a Java applet which downloads a torrent client-side.
> It should be possible to write a similar applet for jigdo.
> I think even reusing existing packages/CDs would be possible then.
> 
> For those who don't have a Java-enabled browser, I think
> a PHP (*flinch*) script could be used to assemble images
> on-the-fly enabling the ability to download them via HTTP.
> The script could be pushed to package/jigdo mirrors to turn
> them into CD mirrors. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think
> such mirrors could be used as webseeds for BitTorrent.
> 
> I'm looking forward to hearing your opinion on these ideas.
> If you think they're worth the effort, I might manage to save 
> some spare time to implement them.
> 
> Best regards. :-)

Hello and sorry for thread resurrection. ;-)

I have finally managed to spend a couple of afternoons on this.
I have ported JigdoFUSE to PHP. If you are interested,
you can get the code at http://f8l.netne.net/php/jigdo.php
Of course I don't expect you to read my ugly PHP, so you can
also try it out on the only jigdo file I have uploaded so far:
http://f8l.netne.net/php/jigdo.php?j=debian-6.0.7-amd64-netinst.jigdo

There is a problem though: the script is hosted on a free hosting
provider, which disallows usage of set_time_limit(), so downloading
the whole image is unlikely unless you have a really fast connection.
(The most I managed to download at home was around 20MB…)
Of course I don't deny the problem may lie somewhere else;
I don't know PHP well enough. I think the script is structured
in a way which makes it easy to implement HTTP ranges in the future.

What do you think about it? Can it be useful?

Regards. :-)

-- 
Mateusz Poszwa