[ubuntu-uk] ubuntu-uk Digest, Vol 27, Issue 47

[Alan Pope]

On Thu, Jul 26, 2007 at 12:16:37PM +0100, Pete Stean wrote:
> Hmm, that hard disc idea sounds good in principal, but then you've got
> someone who is in the position of suddenly having to worry about DOA
> products etc etc - a complete headache waiting to happen :\
> Not that I'm nay-saying or anything, but in reality it sounds a bit like
> hard work to me
> 

Indeed it does :)

There are already people who sell a copies of the repo on DVD/CD, but I 
don't know how popular those products are. 

Hard disks would be potentially harder work in some ways, but easier in 
others. It's very easy to have a cron job that regularly runs apt-mirror to 
keep the "master" copy up to date, and just rsync the master over to a new 
disk as/when it is needed to replenish stock or update it prior to sale.

Dealing with multiple optical media for each customer also has ups and 
downs. If you were to take a copy of the binary packages only then it would 
fit on 3 dual layer DVDs, or 5 single layer ones. If you went for the whole 
repo (for one release) - including source packages as well as binary, then 
it would fit on 5 dual layer DVDs, or 9 single layer ones. These assume 
capacities of 7.7GiB for a DL and 4GiB for a SL.

The above figures were thrown together based on a full repo size of 
35GiB (for one architecture, one release - e.g. Feisty i386 full repo is 
33.1GiB, Dapper sparc full repo is 30.1GiB), and a binary only repo of about 
17GiB (they all differ but that's about the max).

Clearly if you wanted to fully load up a hard disk this is something that 
would be impractical on DVD. For example after Gutsy releases there would be 
3 supported releases that you'd probably ship - Dapper (LTS), Feisty and 
Gutsy. Four (i386, AMD64, powerpc and sparc) architectures makes for a full 
repo size of 392GiB! - Binary only would be around 189GiB. It soon mounts 
up, especially if you go multi arch.

Then there's the possibility of the other architectures like the PS3, 
however you might argue that someone who has a PS3 likely has broadband? 

Cheers,
Al.