Dale Blount wrote:

On Wed, 2007-07-11 at 07:31 -0500, Aaron Griffin wrote:

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On 7/11/07, Paul Mattal wrote:

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I support reorganizing, but like the fact that a single full CD can give me a pretty useful system if I'm a disconnected install. Here's what I find silly about the "1 cd" requirement. Not only can squashfs, with varying compression levels, make this a never ending argument as to the real size, we also generally support "modern hardware" (or used to). This means that we should probably be supporting DVDs.

Now, go ask around. I'll bet ya any money that most people you ask install from the base or ftp isos. Most people who like the current ISO are more like you - it's more of a special case thing.

I can't remember the last time I installed from anything other than the ftp disk. Even on systems that are disconnected, I normally take them somewhere with a fast connection to do install/upgrade, then they just sit where they're at after that. If they ever need upgraded again I could burn current and extra to a dvd or put it on a flash disk. I don't tend to go to people's houses without internet and expect to install Arch and have everything work without upgrading or checking wiki/google.

One thing not to miss.. my design was trying to accomplish 2 things with the [lite] repository: 1) give people a good alternative to downloading/mirroring/carrying EVERYTHING with some knowledge that some smart people have put together a toolkit for them with one of everything 2) provide a guaranteed free/unencumbered repository; if you're big on free software, you can rely on things in current being totally free I admit that #1 is not so often useful. I should clarify; I don't recommend we ship a [lite] installer each release. Just core+support and a barebones ftp installer. The benefit of separating [lite] comes just from one set of broadly functional packages having been chosen by people who collectively know a lot about Arch to be put into [lite]. If you're on a desert island with a laptop with a CD-ROM drive, this is the one CD you want to have with you. I also concede that I don't care about #2 as much as some others. But I thought there were people who really cared about this, and wanted to provide them an easy way to know they're running a totally unencumbered (meaning GPL or less stringent) system where they have the source code to everything and can modify/tweak/understand it. If the masses don't want [lite], I will not be upset. I just see it providing value without requiring much effort. Anyone will be able to create their own "[lite]" with repoman, but that person will not do as good a job at providing a broadly useful set of functionality as the group. This is a feature we actually have now that we would be discarding, and it doesn't seem like there's much effort required to keep it. Why throw it away? - P

On 7/11/07, Andreas Radke wrote:

CDs and in most parts texttools are still useful but no more the bleading edge Arch represents. the much bigger part now wants X+ either QT or a gtk based real window managed world for desktop systems. It's hard to satisfy this group with small CD size isos. we want to do this with DVDs in the future.

Looks like "lite" is a wish for only a minor group of users and might be done outside the official dev group.

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