On Sat, May 21, 2022 at 01:33:02PM +0800, Zhang Boyang wrote: > Hi, > > Indeed, I admit super-big-iso is a crazy idea, and a local mirror is more > useful in most cases. I think there is a few special cases that a > super-big-iso might be more useful. > > 1) Computers / Virtual Machines isolated from public internet or have no > network at all. It is convenient to have such an ISO to install software on > demand. A single file is much more convenient than setting up a local > mirror. It's also easy to manage or verify integrity, if frequent updates > are not needed. >
If you have a computer isolated from the internet / with no network connectivitythen you are essentially "set and forget" - because the only way to update this is to hand carry packages in for security updates or whatever. For that, you can use the DL-BD sized .iso - you'll need a computer that's connected to the 'Net to build it via jigdo / jigit - but you'd need a computer connected to the internet to donwload the DVD or any other medium. The double-layer Blu-Ray disk sized medium is 50GB or so - so you could write that to a 64G USB flash disk. We - the debian images team that build and test the images - don't routinely create all those full size images and put them in the archive - because that would be terabytes with every point release. They're there if you need them. Actually, setting up a local mirror is potentially almost as easy a use case as using gigantic media files. That's exactly what many hosting companies do in their data centres for their own use (and it's also in some of those data centres where some of the Debian country level mirrors are located). So a large isolated network may find it useful to have a local mirror updated periodically. > 2) Archival purposes. If someone (in future, for example, in 2042) want to > install a very old debian system, he/she may grab the big ISO and all he/she > need is that single file. Although it's not easy to grab the file in far > future, but I guess there is always someone crazy enough to archive all > files, isn't it? :P > See, for example, snapshot.debian.org - which is growing. See also the cdimage.debian.org archive directory where you can find most of the .iso files for any release. Also, keeping large files around on disk for a long time - there's some likelihood of data corruption. I'd hate a couple of bit flips three quarters of the way through a 6TB file, say, to mean that the whole thing isuseless. > I think setting up a new variant of image is not very costly for debian > since there are already many variants, so why not give people more choices > :-) > > > Best Regards, > Zhang Boyang > > On 2022/5/21 07:09, Andy Simpkins wrote: > > On 20 May 2022 15:11:09 BST, Zhang Boyang <zhangboyang...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > Package: debian-cd > > > > > > Hello, > > > > > > I suggest debian release a new variant of ISO images, the all-in-one > > > images. These all-in-one image contains ALL debian packages in a single > > > ISO image (possibly all source packages in another all-in-one ISO image). > > > Of course there is no such optical media can hold such a big image, but > > > it is useful for virtual-machines, remotely managed servers, and archival > > > purposes. The theoretical size limit of an ISO9660 filesystem is about > > > 8TB, which is sufficient for including all debian packages. > > > > > > For the name of this variant, I suggest 'everything', 'allinone', > > > 'world', 'virt'. > > > > > > p.s. This is my personal interest, and I would appreciate if you can > > > kindly consider my suggestion. > > > > > > > > > Best Regards, > > > Zhang Boyang > > > > > > > > > > Sorry to put a dampener on your suggestion but why would you need that? > > > > Why not just mirror the archive to a local disk instead? > > > > Then you have your copy of everything and can just point a netinst at your > > local mirror so you can install from there. > > > > I think that would deliver on every use case that you would be able to use > > your big ISO image and more.... > > > > > Andy is absolutely right, I think. If it helps, I'm the "other" Andy in the team along with Steve McIntyre - and yes, I know the problems of copying large images around, have a local mirror here and routinely build at least the single layer BD disk with every point release. This is a topic that comes up fairly frequently in our informal discussions as various people have argued for various sizes of medium - someone was asking for 128G a short while ago - practically, the impact on storage sizes and the pain of testing each size means that we have a selection of all possible requests. It's an open question as to whether we will ever stop making media in physical medium sizes - there's no obvious reason why an iso file needs to fit on a DVD, for example - and then someone turns up who is still using single layer DVDs on a regular basis. The number of people buying burnt physical media is smaller and smaller all the time, but people still request this from Steve and others. With every good wish, as ever, Andy Cater
