Considerations about official localized editions of Live CDs

[John McCabe-Dansted]

(Posted just to ubuntu-devel-discuss at lists.ubuntu.com, as I don't think my
mail is relevant to the other lists)

On Fri, Dec 18, 2009 at 2:26 PM, Paul Tagliamonte <paultag at ubuntu.com>wrote:
>
> I love this idea!
>
> It will be a considerable amount of overhead for canonical to get (
> EVEN ) more CDs, but it would be a great step to a truly global
> operating system.
>

I can see three forms of cost:
1) Ship-it cost
2) Space on mirrors.
3) Effort to generate images.

Are these the main form of overhead?

If [1] is a problem we could only ship one type of CD. IMHO ship-it is only
of limited use anyway and if we are going to mail people a disk we may as
well mail a DVD; cost is clearly an issue and DVDs can be a bit more
expensive e.g. 50c vs. 40c *, but that does not seem a big deal if the DVD
is only shipped to countries not supported by the main CD.

Space on the mirrors does not seem too much of an issue as the country
mirrors should only need one localisation. Presumably adding 1TB of storage
to archives.ubuntu.com isn't a big deal. It would be kind of cool if the
localized live cds could be generated with a script (similar to jigdo)
avoiding this whole issue.

The human effort to generate the images should not be too great if it is
done by a script. The CPU time shouldn't be a big deal either since the disk
images are only released once every few months.

* according to: http://www.dvddemystified.com/dvdfaq.html#5.1

-- 
John C. McCabe-Dansted
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