What CDs and DVDs should we produce for lenny?

[Steve McIntyre <steve@einval.com>]

[ Please note Reply-To: to debian-cd... ]

Hi folks,

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)

Things are only going to get bigger: we're about to add armel to the
mix, and I'm expecting that we're going to grow further yet in terms
of the number and sizes of packages before we release lenny. That
leaves us with a huge amount of data for us to build and host, and for
our mirrors to handle too. So...

 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*?

 2. Is it worth producing all the CDs/DVDs/whatever for all the
    architectures?

 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.

 4. ??? - what else would be a sane option?

Suggestions/comments/complaints - please let us know what you'd
prefer.

-- 
Steve McIntyre, Cambridge, UK.                                steve@einval.com
There's no sensation to compare with this
Suspended animation, A state of bliss