Alpha 1 - Manifest?

[Steve Langasek]

Hi Nick,

On Thu, Jun 07, 2012 at 04:50:54PM -0400, Nicholas Skaggs wrote:
> i suppose I have no real horse in this race, but I'll toss in here. It
> seems a bit odd to me to impose any arbitrary number on ourselves for
> release. Rather, we should look at what we feel is important to ship,
> test and support, and then see if it's within our intended media
> targets. If we support installing in 30 different languages, let's ship
> those language packs. If we could put both i386 and amd64 on the image
> why wouldn't we? If we can support EFI and bios booting on the same
> image, again, why wouldn't we? These are the types of questions I would
> be asking. People may agree or disagree with those desires, but I don't
> think they should be driven by space. Think about and agree on what we
> want to ship, and then look at what options we have to put that onto
> common media.

These are all good questions... and they have been asked before, repeatedly.
:)  They're questions that we as a team ask ourselves on a regular basis in
fact (about once per cycle).

There are a couple of tradeoffs here that you might want to take into
consideration (if you haven't already; reasonable people might consider
these yet reach different conclusions):

 - Even though the media size is no longer a limiting factor, increasing the
   size of images comes with a cost in terms of download time and install
   footprint.  While we could have gone straight with replacing the CD image
   with the 1.5GB DVD image, this is still a bit on the large size for many
   of our users.
 - Ubuntu images, for the most part, wind up the size we decide they should
   be.  If we decide we don't care about the size, they will be much larger
   because the pressure is off to trim the fat.  So if we think trimming the
   fat is a worthwhile thing for developers to focus on, it's important to
   set some limits.

BTW, the amd64 image already supports both EFI and BIOS booting.  It just
doesn't support EFI booting in a way that's compatible with Macs; and making
it compatible is not a question of image space at all, but of arcane
shuffling of boot bits.

> On a side note, we need definitely need to rename iso testing now (these
> aren't isos!)-- folks already wanted to call it release testing, image
> testing or something else.. Probably worth thinking about. Additionally,
> the wonderfully named cdimage.ubuntu.com domain should be changed :-)

Well, they *are* ISOs still; they're just not ISOs that fit on a CD.

-- 
Steve Langasek                   Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS
Debian Developer                   to set it on, and I can move the world.
Ubuntu Developer                                    http://www.debian.org/
slangasek at ubuntu.com                                     vorlon at debian.org
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