Bits from the Debian CD team
Steve McIntyre
It's probably time for a quick update on what we've been up to
lately in terms of producing Debian CD and DVD and (!) BD images.
That will give the game away for the biggest change that has happened
lately - we're now producing some Blu-ray images alongside the
existing CD and DVD images with each weekly Lenny build. As a standard
Blu-ray disc will hold up to 25GB of data, that means that, for the
first time in several years, users should be able to fit all of the
packages for one architecture on a single disc. Woo!
The downside of adding yet another image type is that potentially we
could use up huge amounts more disk space and bandwidth on our central
servers and our mirrors to accommodate them. What I've done,
therefore, is start imposing limits on which images we will produce
each week and with Lenny when it ships. What we now have is (in
increasing order of size):
* Business card and netinst CDs for all architectures (except s390),
available for download as ISO, torrent and jigdo. As for Etch,
we'll also have 2 multi-arch netinst CDs (i386/amd64/powerpc and
alpha/hppa/ia64).
* Full CD sets for all architectures:
+ i386, amd64 and source will all be available for download as ISO,
torrent and jigdo
+ for powerpc we will create ISOs/torrents for the first 8 CDs
only (with the rest as jigdo)
+ for other architectures we'll have ISOs/torrents for the first 3
CDs only (rest as jigdo)
* Full DVD sets for all architectures:
+ i386, amd64 and source will all be available for download as ISO,
torrent and jigdo
+ for other architectures we'll have ISOs/torrents for the first 1
DVD only (rest as jigdo)
+ again, the show giveaway DVD: multi-arch i386/amd64/powerpc/source
containing as much as will fit on a single DVD
* BD for 3 architectures:
+ Single images available for i386, amd64 and source, *jigdo only*
There's scope for more options here; we could do a multi-arch
i386/amd64 BD image if desired, and that would fit on a dual-layer
disc. Other architectures are possible on BD, *except* powerpc is
problematic: the genisoimage code to produce the hybrid ISO9660/HFS
filesystem needed for powerpc fails utterly on such a large image.
Some stats might help here, too. Currently we're looking at a *lot* of
potential images for each full set, and this explains why we're
starting to cut down now!
CD DVD BD
alpha 31 5 1
amd64 34 5 1
arm 30 4 1
armel 31 5 1
hppa 30 5 1
i386 33 5 1
ia64 35 5 1
mips 32 5 1
mipsel 32 5 1
multi-arch 0 1 1
powerpc 34 5 1
s390 32 5 1
source 28 4 1
sparc 32 5 1
-----------------------------------------
TOTAL 414 64 13
Daniel Baumann nd the rest of the debian-live team are also working on
official live images that we'll release with Lenny for the first
time. I've got some ideas of what he's planning in terms of options,
but I'll let him tell you in more detail (nudge, nudge *grin*).
If you have any questions about what I've mentioned here, or any
suggestions on other things we could/should be doing (such as the
numbers of ISOs we're making for your pet architecture), please bring
them up on the debian-cd list.
We're also going to be looking for testers very soon to help us verify
the d-i RC1 and Lenny releases. If you'd like to help, please let us
know.
Cheers,
--
Steve McIntyre, Cambridge, UK. st...@einval.com
"When C++ is your hammer, everything looks like a thumb." -- Steven M. Haflich