Re: Are we losing users to Gentoo?
On Thu, Nov 28, 2002 at 05:13:01PM -0500, Joey Hess wrote:
> People report this to the web team all the time.
And every time they get a negative response, because we cannot fix something
that other people broke: the CD images distribution system. When woody was
released, the CD images were not released on cdimage.debian.org where the
old CD images were. Sure, the jigdo files were released, but as you note
yourself, the newbies don't quite fancy that, do they?
Of course, there are reasons for this change. But the fact is, the debian-cd
people (or whoever -- I just know it's not the web team as the web team has
nothing to do with it) chose to stop officially promoting distribution of
full CD images. That requires a bunch of explanations to random people, and
the random people don't like that.
> There is no technical reason why the "Debian on CD" link could not look
> up the requestor's ip address, a-la-CPAN, and direct them directly to an
> i386 iso image on a mirror near them;
Yes, there is. The debian-cd mirrors on our list are very diverse: some have
2.2r*, some have 3.0r*, some don't have full ISOs at all. Expecting
debian-www team to start making grossly hackish scripts to compensate for
whatever the hell people put in debian-cd/ directories on their sites, or
maintain separate lists of sites that have debian-cd organized properly,
that is just unreal.
(Especially, I should note, when it's basically going to help not only some
honest people who just got confused, but also give a false sense of easyness
to a bunch of people who really shouldn't be installing Debian in the first
place since they have a total aversion to reading documentation.)
Once again, if the CD image situation was clear, the documentation would be
clear as well.
--
2. That which causes joy or happiness.
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