Hi *, Only to get the discussion started again I would like to inject my opinions about the CDs into this list.
1. Which Debian version?
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Basically we have to chose from the dists on our mirrors what to put
on the CDs, so we have stable, testing or unstable. Frozen is not
available yet and unstable is unsuited for obvious reasons.
That leaves us with potato or woody. As far as I know we will also have
the remaining discs from the CHIP Special on Debian (which I mastered)
- Joey, am I up to date here? Those discs carry potato + the 2.4 kernel
updates and a 2.2.19pre9 kernel (+ updated Adaptec driver) on it.
As I see it this would be more suited to beginners - a magazine describing
the installation and use of Debian together with a rock solid release of
our distribution.
Now I expect there will be a lot of technicians and Linux experts there as
well who will want to have something more up to date to play with. I think
we should have at least woody available to show it to them.
Another important point is: We are going to freeze woody at some time. This
is the first time we are doing a full release from package pools. There
will be a lot of problems and we will probably run into most of them when
we are doing woody images now. So we might be able to contribute a lot to
the upcoming Debian 2.3 release.
All things considered I would vote for putting woody on the discs.
2. How about a live file system?
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Basically this would be a nice feature to have on the discs. OTOH I can't
estimate how much work is needed for this. So I would like to defer this
question - let's create something we can install from. If we have time
and motivation left let's try to get this as a bonus.
3. What packages to put on the CDs?
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This is a quite interesting and time consuming question. It's hard to
decide what to put on two CDs (I learned this when building the CHIP
special). It's probably even harder to decide what to put on one CD.
I think we should collect the killer applications that people associate
with Linux and try to press those on the CD. The bare minimum would
be:
1. KDE
2. Gnome?? If we have KDE on it people will expect us to ship Gnome as
well just to be fair :(
3. Apache, MySQL, PHP4 (3?)
4. ...
As you can see that's already a lot of stuff to put on the cd. Perhaps
we should discuss what installation type we are going to support first.
Should we target mostly client installations or full fledged server
systems?
4. How to build the CDs?
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If we are building woody cds, we should use the same tools as we will
use later when creating the release images. So we will have to go
with debian-cd and extend it for our needs. From what Roland wrote
it seems he wants to create the directory tree of the cd and do it
all manually. I think we should make the whole beast scriptable so
that whenever somebody needs to build custom cds he can base it on
our work.
Okay, it's 3am now and I want to go to bed. More to come tomorrow.
I am waiting for comments.
cu
Torsten
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