Date: Thu, 04 Dec 1997 18:04:49 -0800 From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com> To: asami@cs.berkeley.edu (Satoshi Asami) Cc: toasty@home.dragondata.com, nate@mt.sri.com, jak@cetlink.net, current@FreeBSD.ORG, ports@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: 3.0 -release ? Message-ID: <28074.881287489@time.cdrom.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Thu, 04 Dec 1997 10:40:18 PST." <199712041840.KAA03126@silvia.HIP.Berkeley.EDU>
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> Well, at least we are closer to having a full package set available > for 3.0-snaps now. (4-CD snap? :> ) It's no joke, I may have to do that soon! :-( I'm not sure if it could stay the same price if moved to a 4 CD set though since the margins are a lot lower on the snapshot, given its $14.95 subscription price and much lower wholesaler price. I figured the SNAP fans would want the CD to be the cheapest possible resource, overall, and am kind of loath to bloat it into a "real product" like this unless people really want that to happen (comments?). Regarding ports and packages in general, I think that we also need to start looking *really seriously* at the idea of a "multi-volume" ports/packages collection, since a need to split them across at least 2 locations has already been the case since 2.2.5. Even if you prune and chop and tweak like mad for 3.0, I can guarantee you that the packages won't all fit in 650MB [see note]. :-) This means to me that the INDEX file needs to grow at least one more field for the volume name (or maybe we can just tuck it into the keywords field, does anyone even use that? :-) and somebody needs to modify portlint so that a port's volume is checked against its dependencies, it being an error to put your package outside the same volume as all the things it depends on. This would allow me to modify sysinstall to request in turn that the appropriate media be mounted when asking for a specific package that isn't on the current media. To think about: Should we also implement a volume-to-media mapping file which allows the installation to build a menu of valid choices based on the media types the user has available and the "map" of where the packages are available, be that anything from "CD:WC/3" to "ftp://ftp.jp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/packages/japan-latest"? Thinking ahead to where we've got potentially 4000-5000 packages, with an average size of 500K for packages the whole collection is going to be easily 2GB or more. I could see where it might become distributed more geographically, or from a more limited number of servers than supply the distribution bits, and we're going to need to account for that somehow. The second thing I think we need to consider is that in the longer term, I can easily see a day where the ports and packages collection have grown to the point where decoupling them from the primary FreeBSD releases becomes essential in order that the "base system" remain reasonably priced. This would also allow the ports collection to move at its own release schedule, perhaps doing only 2 - 3 releases a year and published in a format closer to Rich Morin's well known Prime Time Freeware for UNIX CDs (http://www.ptf.com/ptf/products/UNIX). They come with a nifty printed book containing alphabetized short descriptions so you can look something up quickly before wasting your time mounting the wrong CD, and I think the ports & packages collection should do exactly the same thing. Doing this would also allow Walnut Creek CDROM to see just how much revenue the ports collection alone generated, and as a new product I'm pretty confident that I could negotiate in advance that a slice of the pie from every ports collection CD sale go into a special "support the ports collection project fund" (over and above money already given to FreeBSD.org) from which we could buy Satoshi and crew a package building machine from hell, among other periodic goodies. :-) [and I've been thinking of some nice 10 drive CCD array configurations which would really do the job nicely when mated with a dual-processor PII-300. ;)] What do folks think of all this? Jordan
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