Re: debian installer (an idea)

[Colin Watson <cjwatson@debian.org>]

On Mon, Jun 23, 2003 at 11:31:12AM -0400, Alfredo Valles wrote:
> On Monday 23 June 2003 10:22 am, Jamin W. Collins wrote:
> > Packages are already compressed.  Putting them on a compressed
> > filesystem won't gain you much, if anything.  There's also a good
> > possibility that it will instead increase the size of the file (yes,
> > increase).
> 
> Ok, so no compression then. But how good is .deb compression? Is it better 
> that the one on knoppix? Just a question, I don't know the answer.

It's .tar.gz. See the deb(5) man page in dpkg-dev.

Another layer of compression might get you a few megabytes, but on the
whole I confidently expect it to be a waste of time.

> > Sure, a "desktop release" as you describe sounds good to most at first
> > glance.  However, it's not a good idea.  If a person is going to run a
> > mixture of stable/testing/unstable they should know what they are doing.
> > There _are_ times that testing and unstable are quite broken.  Having
> > normal end users that installed a "desktop" release hit with these
> > during an update would be terrible to say the least.
> 
> Ok, I may be all mistaken but I think that some "device" need to be
> created to fill the gap betwen the perfect "stable" and the real needs
> of people that want a desktop, which means up to date soft.
> Maybe this could be done by taking snapshots of testing and unstable
> in their least "broken" moments, I don't know.

If testing isn't broken, then we should be taking the opportunity to
release it! In other words, I think the answer is to put more effort
into releasing more often, not into inventing kludges that will hide the
problem.

The number of people currently working on stabilizing the distribution
is smaller than it really needs to be, and most of those people are
flat-out. I'd rather encourage people to help with that than encourage
them to produce half-breed distributions; the sort of people who are
capable of doing the latter are probably capable of doing the former
too.

-- 
Colin Watson                                  [cjwatson@flatline.org.uk]