On 7/11/07, Jason Chu wrote:

On Wed, Jul 11, 2007 at 09:04:57PM +0200, Andreas Radke wrote:

...

for x86_64 we now have

[andyrtr@server64 ~]$ du -sh /home/andyrtr/mirror/packages/extra/ 3,6G /home/andyrtr/mirror/packages/extra/ [andyrtr@server64 ~]$ du -sh /home/andyrtr/mirror/packages/current/ 486M /home/andyrtr/mirror/packages/current/

i686 is ~100MB bigger.

do we want to limit the amount of both repos to fit on a DVD (singlelayer)? this might become hard as pkg size usually raises each release. maybe we can go over that limit but would have keep out packages (e.g. i18n) from DVD releases.

opinions?

Does squashfs get us anything on a DVD? Can we store way more than a 4.7GB of data on one DVD?

I'm sure it gets us quite a bit, at least enough that we don't have to worry about it at the moment. As long as I can get an base install up and running from a CD-R and then use pacman from there, I don't care about this DVD as much as some do. I just don't want the practicality and cheapness of a CD-R to be forgotten. (core+support or whatever has been suggested) -Dan

Damir Perisa wrote:

Wednesday 11 July 2007, Dan McGee wrote: | As long as I can get an base install up and running from a CD-R | and then use pacman from there, I don't care about this DVD as | much as some do. I just don't want the practicality and cheapness | of a CD-R to be forgotten. (core+support or whatever has been | suggested)

or a flash-memory stick with a base++ collection of pkgs to set up a new installation.

having the whole collection of pkgs is only usefull for offline systems as a reference and installing source. you would not want to download 4gb of files if you are not needing 60% of it anyway.

I just want at least one opinion to be heard on this.. I routinely install machines that have no (and can have no) internet access. I mirror onto those machines the full set of Arch repositories (lately including [community] too). The reason is because we don't yet know what we will have to do when we set up these machines, and we need the whole toolkit at our disposal. So there is at least one office full of people operating this way on some machines, not because they want to but because they have to. - P

eliott wrote:

...

I just want at least one opinion to be heard on this.. I routinely install machines that have no (and can have no) internet access. I mirror onto those machines the full set of Arch repositories (lately including [community] too). The reason is because we don't yet know what we will have to do when we set up these machines, and we need the whole toolkit at our disposal.

So there is at least one office full of people operating this way on some machines, not because they want to but because they have to.

Hey. Here is an idea. Keep the installer the same, and create a 'packages' dvd or something like that. With just packages on it. People can mount it AFTER the install and specify it as a repository. No need to complicate the installer build cd, nor any reason to start shipping these huge install dvds when people *dont* need them.

As to difficulty making such a dvd.. it is freakin trivial. Create a directory. Have a file with packages listed in it. Use a shell script to have pacman download the packages into that directory (download-only option). Create the dvd based on that directory.

No need to make it bootable or whatever. bam.

This may already be what you're thinking, but it might also be cool to generate the pacman db for that "repo" on the fly in the installer. So that you can really mount this from anywhere you just have a pile of package files. My other objection about testing still stands, but there's no reason not to make this easy anyway. - P

Aaron Griffin wrote:

On 7/12/07, eliott wrote:

...

...

I just want at least one opinion to be heard on this.. I routinely install machines that have no (and can have no) internet access. I mirror onto those machines the full set of Arch repositories (lately including [community] too). The reason is because we don't yet know what we will have to do when we set up these machines, and we need the whole toolkit at our disposal.

So there is at least one office full of people operating this way on some machines, not because they want to but because they have to. Hey. Here is an idea. Keep the installer the same, and create a 'packages' dvd or something like that. With just packages on it. People can mount it AFTER the install and specify it as a repository. No need to complicate the installer build cd, nor any reason to start shipping these huge install dvds when people *dont* need them.

As to difficulty making such a dvd.. it is freakin trivial. Create a directory. Have a file with packages listed in it. Use a shell script to have pacman download the packages into that directory (download-only option). Create the dvd based on that directory.

No need to make it bootable or whatever. bam.

This is almost exactly where I (?Did I say this one outloud, or did I just think it?) was going to go with this. The requisite feature is "having a hard copy of packages" which can be done hundreds of different ways and _not_ on the installer itself.

This even helps handle my "it's still hard to come up with a set of packages you want and test that that set works" problem for your "lite" set (or my "lite" set). You can keep a wiki page around with a list of packages on it. People can contribute ideas; as people hone the package set, we capture that feedback. People can then easily copy those packages to a CD or DVD for installation. This is truly the promise of lightweight package grouping. All you really need is a list of package names in a text file. - P

On Wed, Jul 11, 2007 at 02:40:57PM -0500, Aaron Griffin wrote:

This seems like a rather silly requirement for no reason. Just like one of those "hey lets only allow 10 documents open at once" features from Lotus Notes.

Why are we limiting things again? If I put all our repos on up-to-date DVD isos, how many people do you think will download them? Probably very very little.

Is there a reason to confine out size to an arbitrary number? What about Bluray or HDDVD or flash drives... maybe we should confine the size so it will fit on my 20GB iPod?

Totally agree, you just beat me to it. In addition, we are primarily network-based for pacman repos. It's very very rare to need to have the entire repos fit on one medium, and I'd say if that is a real requirement for some odd reason, you must be doing something wrong (ie. choose a subset of packages that you need, i bet it's almost nothing) -S

On Wed, Jul 11, 2007 at 11:55:44PM +0200, Andreas Radke wrote:

this is right if you think off users with huge bandwidth connections. but we had it already twice in Germany that a printed LinuxMagazin included the full iso, they also asked for a dvd. that always made Arch more public here and brought new users to the Arch community.

Ok... so then if we have too many packages to fit on whatever they want to distribute, make up a nice subset of packages for those situations.. that's what I said wasn't it?

but then there's also the world with poor bandwith connection where still poeple want to use Arch. do you remember how often users requested a new installation cd release in the past?

Sure, that's why we have our current release schedule. And we're actually following it this time :)

and there's still my intention having ArchLinux prepared for a stable branch that would really need to have DVD medias with all packages.

sure the repos can be much larger. at least we have to make sure there's an easy way to build DVD snapshots on one or more medias whenever we want.

So make a way. -S