CDs DVDs or netboot. Oh my!

[Jonathan Steffan]

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Does anyone have the *technical* reason we are not doing CDs? Is this
because we don't want to have mirrors hosting the additional data? I can
assume the Live images have taken the space we have dedicated for CD
ISOs in the past, is this the case? Is it the testing load.. or is it we
don't want to have to maintain pkgorder in anaconda anymore? ;-)

I hate to blatantly plug Fedora Unity, but we are doing some neat stuff.
The Fedora Project could utilize some of the work we are doing,
specifically with regards to Jigdo. If the issue is really an issue of
storage space, a Spin of CD ISOs could be built against the GOLD tree
(which wont have a changing package set and will survive the updates
tree madness) and then shared via Jigdo. This would utilize the bits
that are in the exploded GOLD tree (the release Everything tree)... not
requiring mirrors to take on additional bits. Fedora Unity will be
releasing GOLD CD iso images (if the Fedora Project wont), but I think
we would prefer to "pass the buck" with regards to testing the Spin. If
push comes to shove, I expect we'll do it. The only *real* drawback to
Jigdo is the moving target of the updates repo for Re-Spins but this is
another issue. I see *no* drawbacks to appeasing the remaining CD users
by releasing a Spin, Jigdo only.

I think PyJigdo (a python based implementation on top of the existing
Jigdo[1]) should be ready for a beta release by the Fedora 8 release
date, if not sooner. No matter if PyJigdo is ready, we can always use
jigdo-lite, but it doesn't integrate nicely with the mirror lists. We
could do a neat server side rewrite of the .jigdo data for the [Servers]
section to just dump in the geoIP list of servers for a given request
but I have given up on server side solutions in favor of a new and
better client. A spin shared with just jigdo-lite will do mirror
failover, which basically means the first mirror listed will get
pounded. To prevent this, end users will have to edit the [Servers]
section and that is not ideal. If the server-side rewrite of the
[Servers] section (based on geo-IP mirrormanager data) needs to be done,
it should be somewhat trivial but I'm not certain it would be scalable
as my last attempt at server-side solutions to the updates tree issues
was a failure.

Let Fedora Unity know, we are here for the community.

These are our stats for CD images for our Re-Spin:

Re-Spin Jigdo CD, Mirror Member 1: 261
Re-Spin Jigdo CD, Mirror Member 2: 204
GOLD CD Torrent (last 4 weeks): 760

These numbers are not "wow, we need to do CD images" but they would be
exponentially increased if they were for "official images" promoted by
the Fedora Project.

Just my $0.02

Jonathan Steffan
daMaestro
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