Philip Hands <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > If there's a way of making multi CD installs work, then I'm all for it. > > One thing: Do people think it's important to keep the possibility of doing a > one CD install, and still ending up with a useful system ?
"Useful" as in "boots", yes! But you get that with the floppies ... apart from that, I suspect we'd have to try fairly hard to get a single CD that gave "most" people a "usable" distribution ... > If so, I would think the thing to do is to move the ``most optional'' > packages > from main onto the second CD, so that the first CD still contains the > ``most important'' bits of main. > > How do we determine what's important, and what's optional ? A couple of weeks ago, I cut for my own use a couple of CDs of slink (without any of the scripts or anything, just collections of packages). What I ended up doing was putting all of main up to extra -- with a few exceptions -- onto the first CD, and the rest (unsuprisingly) on the second. The exceptions I ended up with were "sound" and "latex", as they seemed least likely to be depended on, but that is probably a bad move as presumably games etc depend on sound. OTOH "latex" and "math", while it would make a fair few people use both CDs, might seem sensible. Alternatively, if pkg-order is still around (I just checked, of course it is!), we could do it by getting a list from that and keeping on adding packages until it gets full? Obviously this would need a little work (eg, two packages with circular dependencies need to be on the same CD), but it seems workable to me, and has the added advantage that it's scalable to n cds for any (reasonable :-) n. Or even to floppies, ZIP discs, you name it, although floppies would be majorly masochistic ... > Is something like ``Anything with a priority of extra gets put on the second > CD'' a reasonable guess ? The first CD was still too big when I tried that, but I wasn't doing too precisely; YMMV. On the same topic, nobody has yet mentioned dpkg-mountable as a possible for the multi-CD install, as it was for Hamm. I didn't really have time to think about this for Hamm, as I was busy getting married and stuff (you know how it is ... ;-), but I've given it a little thought and, so long as the packages are reasonably well ordered, it works quite well. I managed almost all of it in a couple of iterations of my CDs, and didn't need the extra knowledge of which CD it had. (It just spewed lots of errors; it could certainly use that knowledge if it was available!) It could work either by reading Packages files from both CDs, or putting all the Packages files on both CDs. Also, another data point (and BTW, please don't think I'm being defensive) is that last time I looked at it, apt still required a fairly clean system to start with. Hopefully this has changed while I've been out of touch. OK, that's enough from me; fire away! Andy
