Re: Content of CDs / DVDs
Hello,
/me puts jigdo author hat on.
On Wed, Oct 20, 2004 at 06:38:07PM -0500, Matthew Dempsky wrote:
> Bartosz Fenski aka fEnIo <fenio@o2.pl> writes:
> > Of course! Now I can't believe I didn't think about jigdo first...
> > probably because I'm not very familiar with it.
> >
> > Assuming that it allows to create custom isos then it's great for this
> > purpose.
> >
> > In fact alongside picking up custom packages we could create some
> > predefined (maybe based on the popularity) templates.
> >
> > Anyone willing to work on it? Maybe some Alioth project? I'm not DD yet
> > so someone else would be forced to create such project. But I would
> > like to contribute in such addition to project.
>
> How difficult is it to generate jigdo templates on the fly? It sounds
> like a fun project if that's not too difficult a task.
It's not /that/ easy, because the .template includes a md5 checksum for the
entire image, and also other, per-file checksums. This means that during
the on-the-fly generation, all the file data needs to be read into memory
to calculate the checksum, so creating the .template will take quite a
while.
(Of course, at the expense of outputting images with a wrong (i.e. zero)
image md5sum, you can go faster...)
Look at Steve McIntyre's JTE project
<http://www.einval.com/~steve/software/JTE/> for something very much like
this. As of 2 weeks ago, JTE is used to produce the weekly CD/DVD images.
All in all, IMHO generating per-user images on the fly is not really
feasible. However, I think it might make sense to offer several variant CD
"compilations", a bit like the "Home", "Professional" and "Server" variants
of other Linux distros.
OTOH, offering such variants will increase the number of available Debian
images yet again. We already offer images for different arches, different
sizes (business-card/netinst/CD/DVD/DLDVD) and different distributions
(sid/sarge/woody), the total number of images is getting truly confusing,
especially for people new to Debian.
Cheers,
Richard
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