Martin Bochnig wrote: > On Thu, Aug 27, 2009 at 4:18 PM, Moinak Ghosh<moinakg at belenix.org> wrote: >> On Thu, Aug 27, 2009 at 7:30 PM, Dave Miner<dminer at opensolaris.org> wrote: >>> Michael Sichler wrote: >>>> Dave, >>>> >> [...]> >>>>> So far we expect that most such customers will deploy using >>>>> automated installation from network repositories, not CD/DVD.< >>>> Not saying I disagree, but what do you base this on? Some would find >>>> it easier to just pop in a DVD, select the packages and build a >>>> system. >>>> >>>> Again, thanks for your reply. >>> I'm sure that some would, but experience has been that media-based >>> installation are not widely used by "corporations and government agencies" >>> as you were defining the potential users. Most of their deployments are >>> done using automation frameworks that pull packages or images from network >>> servers, so features that support those scenarios are where we're spending >>> the bulk of the effort that's targeted at those customers. >> In addition a LiveDVD does not automatically imply ability of >> package selection. >> A live image is the image of an installed system and is transferred >> to hdd as is. >> So a live DVD image will be a much bigger install probably to the >> tune of a 10GB >> OS image. One can of course "remove" packages after the transfer >> but that is a >> waste. One cannot selectively transfer packages from a live image. >> It is also possible to put the liveCD image on the DVD and also bundle in >> an >> offline repository but then again, you may choose not to install all >> packages >> therein. Then what is the point of downloading stuff you may not >> need. Download >> only additional stuff that you need directly from the package repo, >> when you need >> it. That brings us back to the liveCD approach. >> >> Regards, >> Moinak. >> -- >> ================================ >> http://www.belenix.org/ >> http://moinakg.wordpress.com/ > > > Moinak: It is well possible, as I explained 2 months ago. > Just put exactly the LiveCD stuff onto a DVD medium. > But change the install method aways from copying over a huge > monolithic "live" image to a pkg based installation. > > Then different install cluster can be offered once again, like in the old > times. > No big deal, conceptually. I think Sun's engineers could implement a > test release in a few days. A single person might need 2 weeks. >
It's quite a bit more effort than that, in fact, and at present would perform abysmally because the pkg installation from an on-DVD repository uses I/O patterns that map extremely poorly to the characteristics of DVD media. We ran the experiment, so this isn't just theoretical. In other words, you could build one right now if you're willing to go to a *lot* of effort, but you wouldn't want to actually use the result. Dave
