What is the fascination with 'spins'

[Michal Jaegermann]

On Mon, Feb 05, 2007 at 12:17:41PM -0300, Horst H. von Brand wrote:
> 
> OK, today you get 5 CDs with everything (or one DVD). Now you will be able
> to get exactly what you want and build your own CD sets. What is lost here?

Lost here is that little detail that not every user sits at the
end of a very fast Internet connection without any limits on
how much they can download.  It appears that a bandwidth of a DVD,
or a bunch of CDs, is grossly underestimated here.

I also played a bit with 'pungi', i.e. an application which creates
those custom spins.  Among other resources, like time and knowledge,
which were really required to do something with it, sizeable chunks
of a free disk space were also needed and very far from "somewhere"
on the disk.  Big pieces had to be in specific locations or else ...
By "sizeable" I mean something of an order of 30 GB although with
something smaller you should be able to get away with less
(in practice we are still talking about tens of gigabytes and
you better not underestimate).

Sometimes this is ok.  In other situations I will need to deal with
there will be no way to get even much smaller space for something
of that sort.

   Michal