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Re: Open letter to Debian community

...so cd 1 is all you need to have a working debian install which probably has all the packages you need? great! so why not call cd 2-> 'supplementary' cds or something similar so that those who insist on having 3 X environments, the bible, 25 15 year old games, a bunch of IRC clients and 10 MUAs can do so by adding the appropriate lines to sources.list or by getting the extra CDs? meanwhile the rest of us get debian for $5 instead of $20 (or whatever the going rate is in russia) and don't have to have another 2, 3, 4 or whatever CDs floating around with stuff we'll never use.
as someone who spends a lot of their time setting up linux network servers, i may just look at setting up my own mini distribution (a fat version of LRP if you like with proxies, apache, djbdns, qmail etc). can i do something like the redhat kickstart disks to select packages during install? perhaps a package list i can play with on the floppy images? maybe it's the sort of thing i can do as a task or tasks. 

 - samj

At 12:37 PM 31/01/01 -0600, ^chewie wrote:

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
Key fingerprint = B4AB D627 9CBD 687E 7A31  1950 0CC7 0B18 206C 5AFD
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