Re: What to do about the "Official" CD
On Wed, 16 Jun 1999, Steve McIntyre wrote:
> Dale Scheetz writes:
> >
> >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.
>
> If you have suggestions on how to break things up on different CDs, please
> feel free to suggest them on debian-cd. There _have_ been problems in the
> past with the way the CDs have been done, yes. But there is a lot of
> discussion and hard work going into improving the process at the moment.
> In particular, the first CD of the official set works quite well as a
> standalone, in much the same way as your ED by the sounds of things. If
> there are improvements you've made then I'm sure we'd all like to see them
> made for everybody...
So, is there an official image file that has all of the needed upgrade
files? These files are missing on the "Official" CDs I have from
CheapBytes, and the disk can not perform an upgrade!
As I said before, I appreciate all the hard work that you have done to
make this work, I'm just looking for a way to make all that hard work pay
off, rather than provide problems.
Comparing the first official CD to ED is...inappropriate. ED provides all
of the source for every binary package provided on the CD. This satisfies
the GPL in a way that will never come back to haunt me. The Official CD
doesn't work this way. Vendors who only sell the first two CDs of the set
are likely to find themselves in a pickle if they don't keep some source
disks around for the next 3 years. On the other hand, you get a lot more
binary packages on the CD, so the tradeoff is obvious.
There was a package (I don't remember the name) that does some HTTP
package installation which had a pre-depend that caused dselect to die
horribly. I repackaged it without the pre-depend and did the check for the
required packages in the preinstall script. The patch I submitted to the
maintainer in a bug report was rejected.
That, and making sure the upgrade directory was available with its desired
contents allowed me to build a CD that could install every package on the
CD without problems (with the exception of a conflicting web server), as
well as upgrade both Bo and Hamm systems.
I don't see this as having made any "improvements". Asside from being
different in content and structure, I tested both upgrades and new
installs with the CD, and everything worked. It just seems to me that
having a process that will deliver beta CDs to testing people can help
catch these little dangling gotchas.
That is all that I am suggesting.
Waiting is,
Dwarf
--
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Flexible Software 11000 McCrackin Road
e-mail: dwarf@polaris.net Tallahassee, FL 32308
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