>"Michael G. Schabert" wrote:
>
>> Also, I believe that the original thread was mentioning creating CDs that
>> were bootable on multiple platforms...a la
>>
>> >bootable on i386 but with binaries for at least a couple
>> >different architectures, depending on what will fit. (i386, mac68k, sparc,
>> >and alpha would seem to be the popular choices.)
>>
>> The average user (yes, I know, there's not many of them represented here)
>> isn't interested in more than one system at a time. So the difference
>> between the ISO image and what a user would typically download are off by a
>> factor of four. Also, it's not much of a pain to download what's there now
>> with the distrib sets, because it's put into very few files as it is. The
>> biggest advantage to the ISO would be the bootability, but that's what
>> sysinst is for.
>>
>
>What about putting a single-architecture bootable OS-install CD with binary
>packages (all binary CD), and a source CD (all source)? This would be the
>easiest for those who want to just to a quick install for their favorite
>platform,
>and not download irrelevant information. They can pick the CDs that are
>important.
>
>Here's an icky thought - If download hiccups were an issue, we could split
>the CD images into 10Mb chunks or so. If Server/Line contention is an issue,
>it could be set up to limit connection time to say, 6 hours.

But the problem with the 10 MB chunks thing is that would be even worse
than what we have now...I think that part of the point was that the ISO
image would let you download 1 file instead of the distribs. IMO, the best
way to go would be to simply package up the scripts that Bob uses & leave
the downloads as is.

Here's the threads as I see them...

someone said it would be nice for those who wanted to make CDROMs for friends.
    In that case...chances are pretty high that the person doing the burning
    already has their own NetBSD...all they need to do is pretty it up &
    burn it.

Someone said that they wanted to make downloads easier rather than
downloading everything manually.
    I don't think that doing an mget *.tgz is that difficult...when it gives
    you the first prompt, hit "a". You'll have to do that three times to get
    everything...binary sets, X binary sets, & sources. If it's that many
    more steps, then you can always put the URLs into a file & call that.

People are thinking of how much easier this'll make it to make NetBSD
CDROMs. It shouldn't be too difficult to use the cdhdtape with the distrib
sets to accomplish the same thing...or as I mentioned mke a package out of
Bob's scripts...actually, it'd probably be best to make a directory in the
packages tree, with a package for each of the CDROM'able archs as well as 1
package for the hybrid catch-all CDROMs. With those, there would be almost
NO extra disk space needed on ftp.netbsd.org since the package/scripts can
still be getting the files from the distrib sets.

Just sone thoughts,
Mike
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