You are completely right. It's just another way which can help users to use Debian. But if you say users should not distribute Debian in a given form, in my reading you say they should not use it.There are a lot of people who use sid without those CDs, so your claim that without them we would have no users using sid and nobody would report bugs in sid is completely unfounded (not to say ridiculous).
Why is distributing a CD worse than distributing it on FTP/HTTP/whatever?
Because some first time wannabe-linux-hacker thinks that he knows everything and doesn't take the time to read the Debian web pages about the whole release process?
I use Debian exactly on two machines. On my notebook and on the machine which creates the images. And I have no internet access at home (just a damn slow GPRS, on which even fetching the packages file takes a few minutes).bug may be reproduced with the latest available version. If you are so deprived that you don't have internet access, it is much more difficult to upgrade to the latest version (unless you receive a sid DVD daily).
This was the case 5-6 years ago when I started to use Debian at home, so nothing has changed. I started to build those images for myself and even these days I regurarly use them to update my home machine.
This is the only way I can do that, so I build the CDs. If somebody else can benefit from them, I am happy.
Installing/using SID can make pretty much harm anyways, it does not depend on those images. Why do you publish it at all?
The sarge distribution is supposed to be in an always releaseable state, while sid is not. In sarge, dependencies are met, in sid, they are not.
There is a hungarian proverb, "I have already seen a crow on a pole". :)
In sarge, there are not brown paper bag bugs of the kind which are fixed in several days. In sid, there may be, even if they are fixed in a day.
OK, that's SID.
If I make a big mistake in a package and fix it a day later, I don't want this bug to be propagated and distributed widely more than it is already by being in unstable for one day, so I can't be glad that people distribute unstable CDs containing the buggy package which I fixed a day later.
I see. That could make sense.
To me, the ten days delay which happens for packages in unstable to enter testing is exactly the kind of difference which makes testing CDs to be generally acceptable and unstable CDs generally not acceptable.
OK. What should I say?
There were nearly 5000 SID and more than 60000 Sarge image downloads last week from ftp.fsn.hu. I think it helps Debian to spread. If the packages in SID are low quality then blame the developers, not the people who spend money and time to distribute them. :)
-- Attila Nagy e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Free Software Network (FSN.HU) phone @work: +361 371 3536 ISOs: http://www.fsn.hu/?f=download cell.: +3630 306 6758
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