I think this Gateway! CD-ROM is an excellent idea.

On Thu, 3 Oct 1996, Markus Illenseer wrote:

>  The next volume will be a two-CD-set.  But even then, I currently believe
> the space is limited.  Have you yet seen how large the NetBSD 1.2
> distribution is?  My last "du -k" showed 550MB for the mostly gzipped
> archives.

This may be a bit misleading. In the i386 directory, for example,
we have the full distribution as a single .tar.gz file for each
section under the Tarfiles directory, and the whole thing again as
split-up files under other directories. There's obviously no need
to include more than one of these on the CD. (My vote would be for
the large tarfiles myself, since I find those much easier to deal
with, but I don't know if the installation software works with them
because I generally unpack the files myself.)

13 architectures times, say, 25MB per architecture (the binaries
tend be about 20MB; chuck in another 5MB for tools, disk images
and kernels) gives you about 325MB of data. So looking at the basic
set of stuff, we've got:

    Packed binaries for 13 architectures		325 MB
    Packed source tree					30 MB
    Unpacked source tree				130 MB

    Total						485 MB

So this leaves you about 165 MB of space, which is plenty for a
single bootable system. You might possibly be able to pack two
bootable systems in that sort of space, though I don't know if I'd
want to try it, or if it would even be possible to make a CD that
would boot the appropriate version of NetBSD on both, say, an Amiga
and a Sparc.

However, since you have the possibility of two disks, you could
make one boot one architecture, and another boot another architecture,
and load up the remainder of the second disk with X and utilities
and all that stuff.

> most of the sources would be unpacked, so that you can compile them using
> the UNION-fs, and more ideas.

While you're at it, why not drop obj symlinks in all of the source
directories pointing to /usr/obj, so that someone who doesn't want
to use a union filesystem can still do a compile from the CD?

I'll probably buy a copy or two of whatever you put out, just to
support the project, and make sure that I've got something to drag
to a friend's place should he want NetBSD installed. (I don't buy
CD-ROMs much anymore; when you're sitting at the end of a T1 it's
easier just to download another copy from the Internet than it is
to go into the other room where the computer is and put in a disc.)

cjs

Curt Sampson    curt@portal.ca		Info at http://www.portal.ca/
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