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THE "USEFUL CD 1 PROJECT" RATIONALE J.A. Bezemer, Jan-Apr 2001
costar@panic.et.tudelft.nl
Quite many Debian users do not have the Complete Official CD set, but only
one (or sometimes two) CDs. They expect that CD to be as useful as
possibe, that is, to contain as much useful packages as possible.
We have four means to determine the usefulness of a (set of) package(s):
the Popularity Contest (see above), the task-* packages, packages included
on the official CDs of other distributions, and our own experience.
We can distinguish two main groups of people that will use a single Debian CD:
1. People paying nothing
2. People wanting to pay as little as possible
ad 1. This happens mostly at tradeshows/expos/conferences. We can further
subdivide this group into two opposites:
a. Complete Linux newbies that want to use Debian as their first
distribution.
b. Well-experienced Linux users that want to compare Debian to other
distributions, mostly with the pre-determined intent to either switch
to the "best" distribution for their own personal use, or employ the
"best" distribution for some specific project in their company.
ad 2. This occurs mostly by people ordering CDs from regular vendors.
While groups a. and b. are also present here, there is another group that
deserves attention:
c. Relatively experienced Debian users with a reasonably fast and cheap
Internet connection that order CD1 to get the bulk of the upgrades, and
fetch the rest from online repositories.
The mentioned groups each have specific expectations from their single CD.
ad a. Newbies often start using a Linux system guided by some manual or
other piece of literature that may, or may not, be Debian-specific. Many
introductory Linux books describe/demonstrate the same utilities and
programs; however several of these examples don't have much to do with the
daily routine of a more experienced user.
What they do use:
- install tools
- "easy" packages, like task-newbie-help, task-dialup(-isdn), X, Gnome
What they don't use:
- "difficult to learn" packages, like task-sgml, task-fortran
- development packages (well, they may want to compile a new kernel)
ad b. When comparing Linux distributions, quite often either a simple
install without much packages is tried, to see "what it looks like", or a
more elaborate install that mimics one's currently working system, to find
out "what it feels like." Once Debian is recognized as the truly best
distribution, a complete CD set will be bought which will be used to
set-up the production system(s).
What they do use:
- install tools
- "easy" packages
- to compare distributions: packages found in their current distribution /
other distributions from which they have collected CDs
What they don't use:
- packages that require much setup/tuning, or just "a long time to get
functional", like task-database-*, task-news-server,
task-parallel-computing-node
- "heavy development" packages, like task-sgml-dev, task-objc-dev
(maybe they are interested in these packages, but they will recognize
them as being "advanced", and not expect them on the "most popular" CD)
ad c. Upgrading as much packages as possible from a single CD means that
the most-used packages on Debian systems should be present on that CD.
What they do use:
- packages used on at least 5% of all Debian systems (which happens to be
the top 5% of the Popularity Contest results)
What they don't use:
- the rest
Keeping all this in mind, a solution was developed that (implicitly) uses
all mentioned "rating methods" to create a CD 1 that should answer the
stated demands as well as possible. The lists were entered, tested, verified,
cross-checked and adjusted, until an acceptable result was reached.
Further work/Recommendations:
The described procedure has resulted in a drastically reduced number of
task-* packages that are forced to go on the first CD. But since the
Popularity Contest can't handle task-* packages very well, most of them
will be moved to the last CD in the set, while in many cases all of their
"contents" are available on "more popular" CDs. It would make more sense
if a task package is included as soon as, say, 50-70% of it's dependencies
are included. Since all APT tools are available during CD image creation,
this can probably be automated entirely.
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