>> An alternative is to have "virtual ISO images", i.e. images which are >> constructed on the fly (presumably by jigdo) on the web-server side. > Assuming that a complete set of ISOs for whatever medium occupies > at most 100 GB, it seems better to have the images ready rather than to > assemble them on demand, even if the mirror latency and bandwidth are > no problem. > This would spare the nightmare of managing the life cycle of temporary ISOs > on the server. I assume that all images would fit on a single modern HDD.
I was thinking of a scheme by which the ISO is constructed and streamed at the same time, so the complete ISO images aren't ever stored whole anywhere on the server. > But the reason for letting the user perform jigdo download is that the network > load vanishes in the normal traffic of the package servers. If download gets > interrupted, one just has to start it again to get the remaining work > completed. Very good point. I did not consider the interrupt&restart issue. > The production of jigdo files is a linear effort only if the producer > knows where the filesystem stores file content data. This knowledge is in > the ISO 9660 producers genisoimage and xorriso. For other filesystems > the matching jigdo producer software is not available yet. I'm not sure I understand what this means, but it does sound like it implies that streaming production of ISOs is technically possible. Stefan