Re: What to do about the "Official" CD
On 16 Jun 1999, John Hasler wrote:
> Dale Scheetz writes:
> > With a list of addresses to ship the CDs to, we could even enlist the
> > help of a fulfillment house and never have to be involved in the actual
> > production and distribution of the product. This would, of course, add
> > substantially to the costs, but might be worth it in terms of turn around
> > time and uniformity of product.
>
> I would be willing to pay $10 or so to receive such a set of CD's.
If we go this route it would probably be better to donate that amount to
SPI to help refresh the funds. If the vendors benefit substantially by the
testing effort, they may also see it in their best interest to contribute
funds earmarked for this task. Besides, who would you send it to...me? If
that's the case, then OK ;-)
>
> > This last release I produced ED (Essential Debian), a single CD of the
> > essential components of the 2.1 release, and sold it to CheapBytes. As
> > they have recieved not one single complaint about this CD, and apparently
> > have sold enough to be willing to pay me for another one, they are
> > considering selling my product instead of the Official CD set. While this
> > may be good for me, it is clearly not good for Debian.
>
> Why is it bad for Debian? If you can consistently produce good CD's, maybe
> the Official set is unneeeded.
Well, one of the reasons that ED was such a sweet CD was that it only
contained a small part of the total distribution. While I don't mind that
becoming the "standard" for a CD distribution of Debian, it isn't the
complete distribution, as the Official CDs are trying to be.
The reason that this is bad for Debian is that while my reputation might
improve behind such events, Debian's will suffer, specially if we continue
to provide even slightly broken implimentations, while others are
producing working subsets.
You could be right, and the correct way to deal with Vendor CDs is to
provide a simple, fairly complete user platform on one CD, with the
expressed understanding that those who want more development tools, or
other programs not included can find them on the FTP site. I personally
would have no problem with this, as that is just what I am doing now ;-)
On the other hand, it would be superior of Debian to provide the complete
distribution in a working set of CDs, and I would be willing to put effort
into that improvement, although I submit that until we gain some real
control over the "bloating" of the distribution, that any CD
implementation will suffer from these same problems. If we ever get
control of that part of the distribution, the contents of the various CDs
should be much more obvious.
>
> Nothing I've written here need be kept private.
Good, then you wouldn't mind my moving it to -devel ;-)
Waiting is,
Dwarf
--
_-_-_-_-_- Author of "The Debian Linux User's Guide" _-_-_-_-_-_-
aka Dale Scheetz Phone: 1 (850) 656-9769
Flexible Software 11000 McCrackin Road
e-mail: dwarf@polaris.net Tallahassee, FL 32308
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