[arch-dev-public] Additional Package ISOs

[Roman Kyrylych]

2007/9/28, Aaron Griffin <aaronmgriffin at gmail.com>:
> On 9/27/07, Dan McGee <dpmcgee at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On 9/27/07, Andreas Radke <a.radke at arcor.de> wrote:
> > > Am Thu, 27 Sep 2007 18:33:09 -0500
> > > schrieb "Aaron Griffin" <aaronmgriffin at gmail.com>:
> > >
> > > > Opinions, what do you guys think? I haven't really heard much comment
> > > > on this topic so far.
> > >
> > > -1 from me
> > >
> > > Whoever will maintain such a script it will be very hard to satisfy all
> > > license issue.
> > > I prefer to solve the license issue first. Either let's move license
> > > critical packages into a certain non-free repo or mark them in their
> > > pkgbuild with some kind of a tag. I'd like to have the non-free repo
> > > solution.
> >
> > I'm so confused here! The _script_ should not care at ALL about
> > license issues, that is why the script will take a package list! It is
> > up to the person generating the ISO or package bundle to ensure they
> > are in compliance with any license issues, not the script.
>
> Yeah Dan got what I was intending.
>
> What I mean is a script that just uses a file that lists packages to
> build us a nice big fat ISO. I really doubt it'd be much more than a
> pacman --root=foo/, repo-add, and mkisofs.
>
> This way, through human interaction, we can specifically manage any
> and all license issues.
>

I don't mind about such script, of course.
But since we're going to provide our own official OMGHUGE ISO - that
would be we who will need to check those packages for license then.
;-)
Since license support in pacman is not on the top of current
priorities now and IMHO non-free repo is simpler aproach to solving
such issues - I agree with Andy here.

About CD sets vs DVD, bootable vs non-bootable:

1) I don't know if it would be easy to make a bootable set of CDs with
packages - this would certainly require changes to installer.
I see two possibilities here:
a) arrange packages in a way that all dependencies for any given
package should exist on a previous CD (I wonder if it can be done).
b) do not care about the order of packages but installer should -Sw
them first, so they will be stored in pacman's cache on HDD, and then
-S them.

2) Providing a set of CD ISOs with just packages on them is simpler
(users will have to install from core ISO and then just mount such CD
and copy all packages to HDD or straight into pacman's cache).
I makes no big difference in downloading few isos or few thousands of
packages, users can write packages on CDs by themselves even from
Windows box. But in that case the entire list of packages should be
snapshotted (users may download these files during few days which
would make the list outsynced).

3) As for DVD - I think making it installable is easy and costs
nothing, so it would be very nice to have one bootable InstallDVD with
all official repos and another with community.

-- 
Roman Kyrylych (Роман Кирилич)