Hi debian-cd, With etch having 20+ CDROM sized ISOs per arch (plus businesscard, netinst, kde, and xfcd) I am beginning to be reminded of when I first started using Linux and installing required a huge stack of floppies :)
Now most people don't require the full set of CDs to install, I think we keep them around for folks that don't have a good internet connection AND don't have a DVD drive. And that definitely makes sense.... for etch. DVD drives have been out for long enough that new drives are cheap, and you can probably find a used drive for only a few bucks (or free) if you don't want to buy new (even DVD writers are getting affordable). They are available in IDE/SCSI/sata/USB connection types, internal and external enclosures, and it probably possible to add one to machines of all the archs that Debian supports. In the rare cases it's not(and again, these are cases where there is ALSO no good internet connection), people can probably run a LAN cable to a nearby machine that can support a DVD drive and serve things up via http. For the folks that these images are for, the ones far off the internet, I have no idea how many CD images lenny will require, but I bet the cost of that many CDs and shipping will be close enough to the cost of a DVD drive and the fewer amount of DVDs required. Or even shipping a cheap hard drive... Also the CDs are sorted according to popularity. The interestingness of the CD images drops off very quickly after the the first few. Costs of additional CD images: * require additional cycles to generate (pretty cheap, but adds up as it's done a lot) * storage to keep around (currently all the ISOs are 340+ gb IIRC, maybe 40% is the full CD set) * bandwidth to provide (jidgo fixes this for people using it, but not everyone does) * additional bandwidth/storage on mirrors * requires additional torrent seeds So how about keeping around a fixed amount of CD images per arch and dropping the rest? I was thinking 3-4, but it might be cool to keep the first DVD's worth of packages, so maybe that would be 7 CDs? Hmm, we have the kde/xfce images too, I wonder if it would be possible to make each of those be unique beyond the base install and they could act as CD 2 and 3 for each other? Are there other reasons for keeping all the CD images around? If not, now is probably a good time to get rid of them. Thanks, -- Matt Taggart [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
