Am 19.02.2018 um 16:09 schrieb Richard Brown:
Ok, joking aside, seriously, I think you make some interesting points and I'm curious what everyone else thinks.
For testing, I'm doing network installations with this ipxe config: ----8<----8<---- :leap15inet initrd http://download.opensuse.org/distribution/leap/15.0/iso/openSUSE-Leap-15.0-N... chain http://192.168.200.1/dist/memdisk || goto failed ----8<----8<---- So I fetch my net-iso from d.o.o each time. For the released product, I previously copied the contents of the ISO to server's hdd, exported it via http and then installed with a fixed kernel / initrd line and options "install=http://192.168.200.1/...". But to be honest, it has been quite some time since I did fresh installations *after* beta phase finished, my production machines are just upgraded. But if the DVD now no longer contains most of the parts I want to install, I'll need to resort to rsync.opensuse.org to mirror the GA repos.
Personally, I do not agree with your assertion that installation media as a replacement for 'not needing network at install time'. 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. However, I do see how it might be a better value for a general purpose image for many people.
And needing to rsync and store 50GB is of course also going to waste resources on my side, when I was served quite well by the DVD a few years ago. We could of course drop GNOME and KDE from the DVDs, the freed space would probably allow us to add all other desktop environments, and KDE and GNOME could still be installed from the online repositories ;-P
[...]
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. 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.
Agreed.
And yet, creating a 3rd flavour of image, would need a significant amount of build time/power, and significant amount of testing required.
I'm envisioning a "Select your flavor and an installation ISO is created on the fly"-service. How is the product DVD created nowadays? Is it still the crazy mksusecd script? (which might be hackable) Or is it some OBS magic today? (which would be bad, since I don't want to load OBS with the burden of creating lots of different images). How does the installer know which desktops it should offer (under "custom" option)? Is this a list somewhere or does it even look at the available patterns and compile the menu automatically? Another possibility would be the concept of add-on-products, like SLE has: * openSUSE-Base * openSUSE-Module-GNOME-Desktop * openSUSE-Module-KDE-Desktop ... If we would then allow, to just copy the addon-ISOs onto the Base USB stick, the installer experience would be unchanged with a more granular download selection. Lots of ideas, but no time to implement before next winter ;-) -- Stefan Seyfried "For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled." -- Richard Feynman -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse-factory+owner@opensuse.org