James Stricherz writes:
> I tend to agree with this. But how many HD floppies are we talking
> about here??? ?)

The latest beta distribution, compressed, is a total of 14 megs.  (This
is without the source code to the kernel.)  If we were to fit that onto
floppies optimally, we would get:

  14 megs / 1.4 megs = 10 HD floppies,
  14 megs / 800k = 18 LD floppies,
  14 megs / 200k = 70 200k chunks that can be fitted either way.

The last option seems intimidating.  Even with the other two options,
an optimal fit is not nearly possible because we'd want people to get,
say, usr.misc without having to get the whole 14 megs.  Here is a rough
breakdown of the next release:

total 27630
-rw-rw-r--    1 briggs     795649 Feb 28 08:54 bin.tgz
-rw-rw-r--    1 briggs       5659 Feb 28 08:54 dev.tgz
-rw-rw-r--    1 briggs     322521 Mar  5 14:21 misc.tgz
-rw-rw-r--    1 briggs    1245093 Feb 28 09:39 sbin.tgz
-rw-rw-r--    1 briggs    2527950 Feb 28 10:52 usr.bin.tgz
-rw-rw-r--    1 briggs     594014 Feb 28 11:09 usr.games.tgz
-rw-rw-r--    1 briggs     453574 Feb 28 11:23 usr.include.tgz
-rw-rw-r--    1 briggs    1600532 Feb 28 12:09 usr.lib.tgz
-rw-rw-r--    1 briggs    1731966 Feb 28 12:57 usr.libexec.tgz
-rw-rw-r--    1 briggs        480 Feb 28 12:57 usr.misc.tgz
-rw-rw-r--    1 briggs     562479 Feb 28 13:14 usr.sbin.tgz
-rw-rw-r--    1 briggs    1092116 Feb 28 13:45 usr.share.dict.tgz
-rw-rw-r--    1 briggs     576487 Feb 28 14:02 usr.share.doc.tgz
-rw-rw-r--    1 briggs    1303365 Feb 28 14:38 usr.share.man.tgz
-rw-rw-r--    1 briggs    1169431 Feb 28 15:12 usr.share.misc.tgz

All but 3 of these fit on HD floppies.  We could have, say, usr.lib.tgz.1
and usr.lib.tgz.2 pretty easily.  The 800k distribution would take a bit
more splitting.  (7 files would have to be split.)  So let me ask you all
a question: what do you think of the following scheme:

dist/:
-rw-rw-r--    1 briggs     795649 Feb 28 08:54 bin.tgz
...  (above directory)

dist.HD/:
-rw-rw-r--    1 briggs       5659 Feb 28 08:54 dev.tgz
-rw-rw-r--    1 briggs     322521 Mar  5 14:21 misc.tgz
-rw-rw-r--    1 briggs    1245093 Feb 28 09:39 sbin.tgz
-rw-rw-r--    1 briggs    1400000 Feb 28 10:52 usr.bin.tgz.1
-rw-rw-r--    1 briggs    1127950 Feb 28 10:53 usr.bin.tgz.2
...  (and so on)

dist.LD/:
-rw-rw-r--    1 briggs       5659 Feb 28 08:54 dev.tgz
-rw-rw-r--    1 briggs     322521 Mar  5 14:21 misc.tgz
-rw-rw-r--    1 briggs     800000 Feb 28 09:39 sbin.tgz.1
-rw-rw-r--    1 briggs     445093 Feb 28 09:40 sbin.tgz.2
-rw-rw-r--    1 briggs     800000 Feb 28 10:52 usr.bin.tgz.1
-rw-rw-r--    1 briggs     800000 Feb 28 10:53 usr.bin.tgz.2
-rw-rw-r--    1 briggs     800000 Feb 28 10:54 usr.bin.tgz.3
-rw-rw-r--    1 briggs     127950 Feb 28 10:55 usr.bin.tgz.4
...  (and so on)

You could then download whatever distribution would fit best on your
transport medium, and the installer would automatically accept the
split files.  You could download single .tgz files alone if you wanted,
but you'd have to download all parts of a split file for the installer
not to freak out.  Splitting all of these could be automated fairly
easily (for us), and it would only require on the order of 14 or 25
disks (for you), depending on the distribution.

Comments?

Lawrence

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