On Thu, Apr 05, 2018 at 11:09:47AM +0100, ael wrote: > On Thu, Apr 05, 2018 at 03:40:55AM +0200, Adam Borowski wrote: > > On the other hand, I for one haven't owned a machine equipped with a CD > > drive in like a decade (and DVD or BD: never), although I do have a few > > drives in the junk pile, briefly attached one last year to help a relative > > to sort through old stuff. CD/DVD/BD drives are hardware that's already > > rare and will become unheard of very shortly. > > > > > My machine's USB has died. > > > > Unless your machine is a laptop, in which case you already have a keyboard > > and a bad pointing device, but have no way to attach a CD drive even if you > > wanted. > > Sorry, but some current and next generation laptops still have CD/DVD/BD > drives. You do seem to have a very narrow view of the diversity of > hardware currently being manufactured and sold. I am typing this on a > Clevo laptop purchased (without operating system, so linux friendly) > within the last couple of years. This and the current revision has > the usual CD/DVD drive.
You can get new 68080 chips, too. I'm not advocating for dropping support for CD -- heck, old x86 gear most of which did have a CD drive are more popular than all other architectures together (keyboardless ARM excluded, obviously -- it rarely can run De??an well). Guess who's preaching "legacy-less boot"? As for existing popular hardware, the code already exists and works, keeping it afloat is a matter of running a test from time to time. As long as someone steps up to do the maintenace, dropping support would be bad. What I'm arguing here, though, is that new development shouldn't _optimize_ for musty old hardware. For example, if I had the non-trivial amount of tuits it would take to reimplement the installer, it'd have a minimal set of debs for the base system (unless you download an off-line big image), use a writeable filesystem instead of iso9660, save your install choices (for easy-to-use convenient preseeding) and cache all debs you download while installing, thus using the very minimal bandwidth whether you install a single machine or hundred, small servers or newest BloatDE. What this has to CDs? Note that if you burn such an install image to a CD, such a filesystem (I'd pick f2fs but ext4 would work too) will still work fine if the media is non-writeable. It'd be a notch less effective than iso9660 which was designed for CDs, but other than missing on new goodies (auto-preseeding and apt cache), you'll still be fine, just like with current installer. Another such possible improvement would be using all cores the system has (last year, I shopped for the very cheapest SoC that has local storage, ethernet and USB, and the smallest I could get locally had 4 cores, 512MB ram) -- note that any userspace code that can run in parallel will still work perfectly on uniprocessor. So it'd be optimizing for modern but 100% supporting legacy. Etc, etc. Meow! -- ⢀⣴⠾⠻⢶⣦⠀ ⣾⠁⢰⠒⠀⣿⡁ ⢿⡄⠘⠷⠚⠋⠀ ... what's the frequency of that 5V DC? ⠈⠳⣄⠀⠀⠀⠀ _______________________________________________ Dng mailing list Dng@lists.dyne.org https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dng
