Hello Gentoo, I would love to see additional CD's/ISO's in the Gentoo distribution, containing most files from the /distfiles branch. Reason: For users with a slow internet connection or without a flatrate building a Gentoo system would be painful, because of endless downloads and very high connection costs. Suggestion: Aprox. 2-3 additional ISO-images, containing the current version of some commonly needed /distfiles. Given that, some ISO- sellers would distribute those CD's along with the core Gentoo CD and everyone who isn't willing to download ~1.5GB could buy these CD's for small money.
You know what? I second this idea.
I just got on board of Gentoo a few days ago. I like it. Brings back memories of the old days (1998) when I first started playing with Linux. Anyhow living in Australia I got limited download capabilities even with cable modem. I used the 135 MB install CD. It makes things easy. I recon you guys can fill it up to 690MB next time. I think one CD should be enough but use all the space there is.
Just to see how much we're talking about, I took a semi-newly installed machine. (Built with X and KDE) and ran 'emerge -f --emptytree world' and took a look at the usage in /usr/portage/distfiles. I ended up with about 588MB. Just one thing though - I really like being able to download a SMALL ISO image. It's not too terribly difficult to _also_ relase an ISO w/o the distfiles on it as well, and it's not an immense amount of space usage on the mirrors.
I think this would be a good option to have for some users. I have a script in gentoo-src (verwilst/gentoo-packager/package-source I believe) that walks the deps, etc for stage2 + stage3 on all arches available and makes a single src tarball out of all the srces for this much of install. It might be good to have an iso that included these w/ some small instructions on how to untar to your distfiles dir, etc. Any thoughts on this? Any takers? Who is managing the live cd stuff ATM ?
Thinks its between Daniel and sasquash. It will have to be updated on a regular basis though .. maybe via a scripts ?
*** Bug 5535 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Besides having a tough time determining which distfiles to put in an ISO, our tree is so dynamic that the ISOs would quickly be way out of date...
<quote> Besides having a tough time determining which distfiles to put in an ISO, our tree is so dynamic that the ISOs would quickly be way out of date... </quote> Yeah? What is the difference from now and then? Now you do a 1.4 iso (w/o distfiles) which contains packages which will be out of date tomorrow. Some people would like a 1.6 iso (w/ distfiles) which contain packages that will be out of date the day after release. The problem is that maybe people shouldn't always download the whole new package but a diff instead and this issue would be circumvented. (Gentoo diffs to save bandwidth- another big topic.) It's not about assuming that packages will become outdated. It's about giving people with thinner pipes a chance to be Gentoo users. mk
Hey, If somebody wants to go ahead, download all most commonly used distfiles and burn them on a set of cds/dvd that would be great. But I don't think its a good idea to triple our mirror bandwidth/hdspace usage by making these distfiles isos publically downloadable. <idea>Maybe someday in the future a gentoo magazine with montly dvd filled with tarballs will be created.</idea> Also I can imagine that uploading more/bigger iso's can be a problem bandwidth-wise to the people responsible for creating them. My upload quota is currently 4gigabyte/month and I'm already exceeding that (GRP,cpu optimized stages,all sorts of isos:livecds,livecds with stages, livecds with grp...).
I thaught this was already part of our plans, offering GRP and a second or more cd's with all the sources at least to build a full system from stage1 and also all the sources for the GRP programs without the need for a net connection. I agree that our tree is very dynamic and these sources would be out of date very quickly, but this is a limitation across all distros and isn't limited to Gentoo. To date our "releases" have been mostly symbolic with the only changes being better and better install CD's. With the advent of GRP and src cd's we are truly coming into the realm of real "stand alone" releases without the need/dependency on a net connection to install a current snapshot of our portage based system. Basically with OOo and other great programs available on disk we have much more functionality and flexibility than that litlle OS from Redmond. To comment on the bandwidth issues, IMHO bandwidth problems are for infrastructure to handle (now that there is a great infrastructure team in place), and if we as a distro/release team start on the path that we can't put out useful products/features etc. because of our limited resources I feel this will progressively diminish our innovation. The bandwidth problem should be addressed immediately with infrastructure to effectively avoid this bottleneck. Ultimately, the descision comes down to what the majority of all of us wants and feels we can handle. I just wanted to express my opinion :)
With regards to comment #8... What we produce now are stages. Those stages work like this: stage1 - doesn't matter, building everything anyway stage2 - only packages built during bootstrap matter, everything else gets built stage3 - all base system packages matter, stale stage means a big emerge -u world The difference here is that we're talking about a minimal number of packages, many of which do not get upgraded very often. What you're talking about is a pretty massive subset of the packages in Portage. That gets stale really quick and sucks up huge quantities of mirror space (which is a _massive_ concern). What you're talking about is taking the current issue with stale stages and then adding a whole new level of issues on top of that. I used (and developed for) Gentoo on a 56k dialup for at least six months and had no serious issue. Certainly, it would be nice to be able to just pop in a CD and have all of your distfiles there - it just doesn't work too well from a practical aspect and starts getting to the point where the cure is worse than the disease. There's already work being done on the 'using diffs' thing. With regards to Brad's comment, "stand alone" releases that can be installed independent of a network connection totally wreck the dynamic aspect of Gentoo Linux and are completely contrary to our current release mentality. Whether that's a good thing or not is up for debate, but I don't think we should strain our people and our infrastructure for it. I think that putting distfiles on an ISO or a CD is something that people independent of Gentoo can certainly do just as well. With regards to infrastructure: Bandwidth is not free (nor cheap). You donate the bandwidth and a server for it, we'll put up massive ISOs. It's unfortunate, but that's the reality of infrastructure: if you're not rich, there's never enough of it.
We used to have a vendor that sold distfiles on DVD. He stopped selling them because of lack of demand, despite the fact that we mentioned his company several times on the forums and on mailing lists. I don't see spending the time, effort and infrastructure resources necessary to place our 12GB of distfiles into ISO format as being particularly effective. There's certain merit to providing people an easy way to download packages for an initial install, but the GRP already addresses that. As an additional consideration, we already receive numerous complaints from our source mirrors when we release a new ISO (such as an experimental cd or something similar) because we already take up so much space.
OK, I guess I need to do a little more explaining of my point. First off, by no means did I mean anything close to 12gigs of distfiles on cd/dvd. The source cd I'm talking about would only consist of all the distfiles that make up our bootstrap, system, and GRP. Theoretically the bandwidth would be essentially the same as pulling each individual distfile at the time of install, but I realize many more people would download this just to have. Secondly, unless I'm way off in left feild, the "stand alone" release is basically the point of GRP (a way to quickly install a full gentoo system with some of the most requested, compile time consuming packages, prebuilt) the source cd would just add a layer of flexibility to that. That's the main reason I quoted "stand alone" and "releases" because they are loose terms not necessarily to be taken literally. In conclusion, I can see the source cd idea doesn't seem to have the necessary backing to make it a reality, which is fine with me, but the cons to me seem a little contradicting. I just wanted to make sure my opinion was heard.
If we're going to provide an easy way to download lots of source tarballs (outside of portage), I would rather see a simple text list that could be fet to wget or a standalone script that will mimic some of the functionality of 'emerge --fetchonly'. The source tarballs are already there -- copying them over so they're stored a second time in a different (ISO) format seems like a waste of distfile mirror space at a time when our distfile mirrors are already complaining about the amount of space we take up on their mirrors.
sounds like a good compromise to me....kills pretty much all the birds with one stone :) good idea
This bug died of old age. Closing as WONTFIX.
Moving these so we can remove the "Install CD" component from "Gentoo Linux". I apologize to everyone for this spam, but according to the bugzilla developers, this is the only reasonable way to do this.
