[Mageia-discuss] Suggestions for the ISO

[andre999]

Marc Paré a écrit :
>
> Le 2010-11-01 08:50, André Machado a écrit :
>> I fully agree and say more:
>>
>> Mandriva One has six different isos for each language, what can 
>> confuse user;
Actually 2 different CDs for Gnome, and 4 for KDE (because KDE needs 
more space).
>>
>> Ubuntu has only one iso with all languages, but the basic. Why not 
>> create a
>> Mageia One with only basic languages? Rest of translations can be 
>> downloaded
>> during installation.
Possibly satisfactory for those with fast connexions and large 
bandwidth, but unsuitable for those with slow connexions and/or limited 
bandwidth.  That is one failing of Ubuntu.
>>
>>
>> And I agree: we can do something like a "Mageia Update Pack" when 
>> each month we
>> create an updates iso with all updates from last month.
It would be better to have all the updates since the last release, to 
keep a more stable base.  If packages are available as incremental 
updates since the last release, the size of such updates will be 
considerably smaller.  That way we could potentially produce update CDs 
at any time, from an incremental update repository.
>
> OK, you know what I'll say to this, I like it!
>
> Remembering that we are trying to keep the amount of data down for 
> dial-up connections:
>
> Re: Mageia One: I think the idea behind the iso's was to try to divide 
> earth into 6 "language" areas in
Actually only 2 for Gnome, 4 for KDE.
> the hopes of supplying an iso that was specifically targetted to each 
> specific areas. If we were to offer only 1 basic iso how much more 
> data would a user have to potentially need to download and would this 
> add a considerable time to her/his download time?
Once (when I had more limited space on my main partition) I removed all 
unwanted language files - not counting language-specific rpms, which 
were not installed - and reduced the total space used by over 15%.
In the space still used, were all system-wide configuration files and 
log files, as well as various temporary files.  So considering that 
there are many language-specific rpms, I would't be surprised if there 
were 20% less space for applications on the all-languages CD.

> As the original thread spoke of supplying a member with a Mageia disc 
> from a local Community, would the Community be able to provide a copy 
> of the Mageia One disc along with the translation required by the 
> user? Would this be possible?
>
> Re: the main Mageia ISO: a "Mageia Update Pack" would be great. I 
> wonder, why would Mageia not offer this by default for download? Is 
> there a reason for this?
One could always download the update repositories, which would be the 
equivalent.
Rpmdrake could be modified to facilitate this.
However very few users would have close to all these packages installed 
- and certainly not many bandwidth-limited users, as to do so would 
require a very large amount of disk space.

On reflection, it would probably be much more useful to have incremental 
updates for individual packages, for the files changed in the package 
since the last distro release.
Typically much less than 10% of the size of the full package; probably 
more like 1%.

Another post mentioned that all the updates from one release to the next 
accumulated to 700M, or the size of a CD.  It would be surprising if a 
typical installation used more than 10% of the packages available, thus 
not more than 70M, and a typical bandwidth-limited installation would be 
much smaller.
So with incremental update rpms, we are talking about 7M or less for a 
typical installation over 6 months, or about 1M/month, and much less for 
a bandwidth limited installation.
Thus incremental updates seems to be a better solution for most 
bandwidth limited users.
However CDs of updates could always be done on an ad hoc basis.
>
> As the original thread was about supplying users with a copy of a 
> Mageia disk, the local Community could then supply the user with a 
> copy of the "Mageia Update Pack" disc.
Another point : such a disc would only be up to date (or almost) at the 
moment of its creation.  2 days later, it would almost assuredly be 
outdated.
>
> Marc

my 2 cents :)

- André