On Wed, Jan 31, 2001 at 03:54:26PM +1100, Sam Johnston wrote:
> the size of debian may not be a big issue now, but when do we draw
> the line? 5 CD's? a DVD?
Size is not a problem. If there's a *.deb for an application,
programming language, server, or document, it's there because someone
found it important enough to package. That's something to consider
when you start asking questions about popularity or maintenance.
It's quite obvious that the goal of Debian does not involve selecting
"premium" packages for distribution. It is about giving the user a
choice, and what kind of choice would the user have if we only
provided one DNS server and one X-Windowing environment?
How about this as a suggestion. Why not read the man page for dpkg(8)
and get the low-down on the options '--get-selections' and
'--set-selctions'. Then read about apt-get(8) and apt-move(8).
Create an über-dist mirror of all of your "select" packages. Use
dpkg-scanpackages(8), dpkg-scansources(8), and gzip(8) to build your
Packages.gz and Sources.gz files. Charge people $5 for the media and
burn process and $3 for shipping.
On the note of popularity...
bash$ apt-cache show popularity-contest
Package: popularity-contest
Priority: optional
Section: misc
Installed-Size: 35
Maintainer: Avery Pennarun <apenwarr@debian.org>
Architecture: all
Version: 1.0-1
Depends: gawk, dpkg-awk, mail-transport-agent
Recommends: cron
Filename:
dists/potato/main/binary-all/misc/popularity-contest_1.0-1.deb
Size: 10434
MD5sum: e367e721c10dabbe30d50e788a8df79d
Description: Vote for your favourite packages automatically.
.
When you install this package, it sets up a cron job that will
anonymously e-mail the Debian developers periodically with statistics
about your most used Debian packages. . This information helps us
make decisions such as which packages should go on the first Debian
CD. Also, we can improve future versions of Debian so that the most
popular packages are the ones which are installed automatically for
new users.
From the README file in /usr/share/doc/popularity-contest:
I periodically post survey results on my web page:
http://people.debian.org/~apenwarr/popcon/
So, the developers who determine what goes on release CD's actually DO
have statistics to help them out. My question is then, "What's the
problem?" Honestly, people need to do a little research. This took
me all but 2 minutes to put together.
--
Chad Walstrom <chewie@wookimus.net> | a.k.a. ^chewie
http://www.wookimus.net/ | s.k.a. gunnarr
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