-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA256 El 2018-02-19 a las 16:09 +0100, Richard Brown escribió:
On 19 February 2018 at 15:04, Carlos E. R. <robin.listas@telefonica.net> wrote:
I don't use either, but that's perhaps not a bad point. Is the DVD format dead or dying for this kind of thing? For installation from local media, might it be an idea to up the size? I guess we wouldn't want to carry two (DVD + USB).
I have not used a DVD for installation in ages. Current laptops don't have one. New computers have Blue Ray drives instead.
Besides, there are double layer DVD, if absolutely needed.
The smaller stick I can get is 8 GB, that sounds like a reasonable limit today.
The purpose of the installation DVD is installing without needing network at install time - but if we need Internet to be able to install some of the patterns, the purpose is broken. It becomes a Net Install with bigger media.
<joke>
Who are you and what did you do to Carlos?
The real Carlos would never advocate for embracing current realities at the expense of old tropes
You're going to have people calling you names for your mean horrible ideas about getting rid of old stuff which 'everyone' uses! ;)
On behalf of the openSUSE Project I demand you release Carlos from captivity and let him post on this mailinglist again
</joke>
Ha ha. Mmm.
Ok, joking aside, seriously, I think you make some interesting points and I'm curious what everyone else thinks.
Personally, I do not agree with your assertion that installation media as a replacement for 'not needing network at install time'.
You can see it happens: the DVD is used for installation for people that do not have a good Internet connection at the place they do the installation. Some for policy, some because limited resources.
Our repos have always held many more GB of packages beyond that which we ever could fit on the DVD. You'd need over 50GB to have a portable copy of the repos to install everything without network, 8GB would be no where near enough.
Of course, but it would be enough to include the basics of alternative desktops, which now have disapeared from the DVD.
However, I do see how it might be a better value for a general purpose image for many people.
That said, I also cannot accept your earlier statement that "Nobody uses DVD today". We have our friends at Open Source Press making and selling Leap DVD box sets. We have thousands of DVD's a year which we give away at conferences worldwide.
Both of those use cases require a 4.1GB DVD image.
Right, I see that there are people still using DVDs.
Plus plenty of newcomers to openSUSE already see that 4.1GB as way more than they expect to download. This is a particular concern in countries without pervasive bandwidth.
No, here I do not agree, precissely because I have had for years a single one megabit ADSL connection. Installing from netinstall is simply not possible with that connection. What I did was download the DVD over several days (not using the full bandwidth, I still needed to do other things). Other people download the DVD at other sites. With the current situation, those people simply can not install XFCE at all, they are forced to choose gnome or kde even if their old machines hardly cope with them. They have to do what someone mentioned in this thread: download the entire oss repo to a hard disk on usb or local lan.
Sure, to some degree it's an unavoidable side effect of our distributions not being monoculture nonsense like Ubuntu, but making the disk image larger will just make things harder for those people to jump on the openSUSE train.
And yet, creating a 3rd flavour of image, would need a significant amount of build time/power, and significant amount of testing required.
The more I think about this, the more I think our 4.1DVD image might still be the best middle ground that we have to balance these competing concerns.
Well, as I see it, as the 4.1 GiB has to stay, we could either create an alternative 6..8 GB image for USB (even if less tested), or have it as "add-on", connected during the installation. An alternative would be a script that would download and create an external media storage having what is needed to install another pattern. Say, I want to install XFCE, run a script that creates an addon disk with XFCE that can be connected during the install so that I can install XFCE - or whatever other pattern is available via netinstall. This way the mirrors would not have to be loaded with more images. Or at least instructions for creating them. - -- Cheers Carlos E. R. (from openSUSE 42.3 x86_64 "Malachite" (Minas Tirith)) -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v2 iF4EAREIAAYFAlqLHhMACgkQja8UbcUWM1xbZwD+MSXYcoJy1Hzxe+6AJzu6gWFj vcuuVaZYRHcunvzF6FEA/2hRhWEL66gJYAvVjuhS+fIIgUtaCYFWEOzFv2kTE0HA =faBP -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----