On 2/24/07, [EMAIL PROTECTED] <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>Are the engineering benefits got out of abandoning CD-ROMS greater than
>the loss of a few (?) developers, students and users ?
This is something we need to discuss; and what alternatives there might
be.....
Driving upward the installer footprint, requiring "live" upgrade and
other current plans run, I think, contrary to the goal of increasing the
developer base.
Absolutely. And starting to cause trouble for existing committed
users. I would estimate that many developers we might wish to attract
have less well resourced systems than I have, and I'm starting to
get worried.
If anything, we need to lessen the footprint and simplify deployment
instead of making it ever more bloated.
Question we can ask ourselves as community are:
- Can OpenSolaris distributions fill the "low-end" void?
- Would a single CD installer image which can point to an (Internet)
based server fill the need of the "DVD have-nots"?
It's not just a case of DVD vs CD media. I use the DVD download, because
there are none of the architecture dependent issues that go with CD1,
and it's not as though I can save on downloads by only grabbing a few of
the CDs - the split between them is such that I need all of them.
There was a time during one of the beta programs I was involved with
when we had netinstall images available. For me, the only thing I do
with a DVD image is build a netinstall image.
One significant improvement would be a way of pruning that image
to minimise the amount I need to download. And I would want to
pull stuff across to my local install server.
Another issue is that - particularly for SXCE - the differences between
releases are rather less than the whole image. It would be nice if
we could just grab the changes rather than having to pull the whole
lot. (For example, staroffice doesn't change every build.)
- Is live upgrade really something we should force?
Definitely not. I don't use it; it add significantly to the install and
management cost. If the problem we're trying to address is the
possibility that upgrades cause harm, then we need to address
that so that in-place upgrades are safe and successful.
--
-Peter Tribble
http://www.petertribble.co.uk/ - http://ptribble.blogspot.com/
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