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.
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
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....
