Debian Wheezy To Take Up 73 CDs Or 11 DVDs

[RealNC]

P.s. what ever happened to 2.88MB floppies?

The real reason the format didn't make it is anyone's guess. Most probably it was due to the high price of media (four times the price of a 1.44 disk) and incompatibility with some controllers (meaning that you could buy such a drive, but it wouldn't work when you put it in your PC if you had an older controller.) And this meant that software wasn't offered on such disks, since the vendors wanted to be as compatible as possible. It's a vicious cycle: software comes in 1.44MB disks, so you don't need to buy a 2.88MB drive. People don't buy 2.88MB drives so software doesn't ship in 2.88MB disks...

[smitty3268]

Okay, now you're just trolling. Equating bloat = better simply is not true. Bloat does not equal more pretty, more speed or more features. If the distro optimized for 64mb does exactly the same using less memory, how is that distro worse?

That's right, it isn't.

Except it isn't the same. The whole point of using the better compression algorithm, is... well... the better compression algorithm. Less downloading, hopefully faster installs, etc. Suddenly i lose out on those benefits just because 1 person in a million has to have it run on a 32MB machine from 1998? That's stupid.

It's the same idea behind the distros mostly require 586 support for thier x86 distros. Some even require 686, while others are at 386. If you argue that they have to stick with something compatible with the 8086 just because you happen to have a machine that old, well, I'm going to tell you to go with LFS or another distro that better fits your needs.

[AJenbo]

use x86_64 already

[curaga]

Except it isn't the same. The whole point of using the better compression algorithm, is... well... the better compression algorithm. Less downloading, hopefully faster installs, etc. Suddenly i lose out on those benefits just because 1 person in a million has to have it run on a 32MB machine from 1998? That's stupid.

It's the same idea behind the distros mostly require 586 support for thier x86 distros. Some even require 686, while others are at 386. If you argue that they have to stick with something compatible with the 8086 just because you happen to have a machine that old, well, I'm going to tell you to go with LFS or another distro that better fits your needs.

Please count the difference between xz -6 and xz -9 compression. I bet it's on the order of 0-1%.

I tested some files, and saw no difference - though all of them were smaller than 64mb.

[RealNC]

There's also the lrzip (Long Range ZIP) tool (interestingly, by Con Kolivas) which has some truly amazing compression ratios. I think it's even being included in libarchive. It's very slow at compressing, but decompressing in quite OK.

[Jonno]

Please count the difference between xz -6 and xz -9 compression. I bet it's on the order of 0-1%.

I tested some files, and saw no difference - though all of them were smaller than 64mb.

As xz -6 and -9 uses the same cpu settings, the only difference is the DictSize, so on files 8 MiB or smaller, there is no difference whatsoever. On larger files the difference is generally still quite small...

[Ibidem]

Distro optimized for machines with < 64MB memory over normal machines that 99.9% of the user base will have -> user abandons and consequently installs a better distro.

See how that works? Everyone gets to pick what works best for them.

Here's how it works in real life:
Distro1 supports 64MB machines
Distro2 needs 512MB or more for all the "cool features" > runs sluggish > gets derided for sluggishness
Distro2 users think about switching to distro1; find some features missing >complain about distro1 supporting obsolete hardware

If you don't see that, reread this thread! :P
Debian has chosen to support 64 MB machines. Live with it. There are other distros for you to use if you can't.

[smitty3268]

Here's how it works in real life:
Distro1 supports 64MB machines
Distro2 needs 512MB or more for all the "cool features" > runs sluggish > gets derided for sluggishness
Distro2 users think about switching to distro1; find some features missing >complain about distro1 supporting obsolete hardware

If you don't see that, reread this thread! :P
Debian has chosen to support 64 MB machines. Live with it. There are other distros for you to use if you can't.

I honestly don't care. I think it's silly to consider that an important criteria for their distro, but if that's what they want to support then it's fine with me.

It's you guys who are getting up in arms about this.

[WSmart]

One might download download all this to help the distribution via bit torrent.. I know Debian has torrent update support for at least one of the repos. Not sure how that works or if any of this would be available past the ISO torrent.

@Ajenbo

I understood you the first time Great question. Thanks for the post.

At least the decompression could be done as soon as it's downloaded. I think this reflects a general lack of enthusiasm from the developers. I'd like to see a contribution share ratio set up to help improve non-developer contributions where hopefully we could pay developers a market compensation which would give them more time to do stuff like that.

One reason to not install stuff during download is that you could end up with a dead system if something happened. Probably 5% of the systems out there are capable of crashing under load, at least during the summer months, and maybe more for laptops with their $60 dollar cooling fan assembles that are harder to service then the fan belt on a car. I still say it could be done, with a little thought, but I think right now we have devs who are overworked and underpaid, “Captain! She can't take much of this!”, and we might have leadership issues same as we do everywhere else -the cream is definitely not rising to the top in our alcohol loving cultures of denial.

The Xbox console game manufacturers PC OS also does it that way too, in serial, all of it. They should have waited until IBM developed it further before running off with it.

@GreatEmerald

I'll have to try Gentoo and see if that actually does anything different. I'm skeptical

Thanks all.

Be real, be sober.

[AJenbo]

Yeah it seams more a implementation/time issue then a technical issue. As the current implementation works well going the extra mile for a bit of speed but more complexity might be a strain for the developers working on it.