"Eric Delcamp <edelcamp@easynet.fr> writes:

>We could make a different system to get useable SOURCE-only CD for all
>architectures:
>
>-Make a CD-ROM with all sources (compressed) and a per-architectures binary
>for compilers and tools.
>-Make a boot floppy to start install (one or two per architecture).


>With the floppy, you can install the common source code and some common
>files from the CD. The rest of install is constructed with a compilation of
 >the source (and using the tools on the CD).

There are ports where the compilation would take two or three days.
And there are ports where a full bootstrap-the-compiler-toolchain and
re-compilation including X might more like two or three *weeks*.
(vax 11/750s...)

And there are ports where most machines don't have floppies from which
to boot. And floppies and floppy duplication are expensive, Mbyte/$,
compared to a CD.  (But you can't win with those anyway).

But IHMO boot-floppy-plus-tarballs-on-CD is a better approach.  The
shelf life of source code is just too short to be worth burning into
CD-roms.  The shelf life of NetBSD distributions is, currently, much higher.