ports on a CD

[Pat Lashley]

--On Tuesday, September 23, 2003 00:59:30 +0100 Tadimeti Keshav 
<keshav_tadimeti at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:

> Is it possible to get all of the ports on a CD set?
> This is one area where Linux fares better. Debian
> offers a 7 CD (OK they don'y make ISOs) set that
> contains all packages.

The short answer is "No".

Some of the ports have licencing restrictions that
prevent that.

Now if you're just talking about the ports that may
legally be included on the CD set; it's a space tradeoff.
Adding more would mean more than 4 CDs in the set,
which would raise the cost of producing them.  Which
would in turn raise the price to end-users.

On the whole, I'd rather keep the current setup and
see about putting more into a DVD based release...

> I think the FreeBSD distribution would be better off
> having all ports on the 2 additional CDs rather than
> have packages. For starters we get 5 window managers.
> We could easily do w/o KDE & GNOME and have JRE/JDK
> and OOo instead.

You might; but others would take the opposite position.
I suspect that if a vote were taken KDE and GNOME would
get more votes than Java and OOo.

And having packages makes the system install -MUCH-
faster.  You really don't want to make new users wait
while the entire GNOME suite is compiled.  There are
already complaints that the installation process takes
too long.

>                  I might just have to give up FreeBSD
> for the reason that downloading ports is turning out
> to be expensive.

Sounds like a business opportunity.  Make and sell
CD sets with the 'missing' ports.  Every couple of
months, a new snapshot of the entire ports tree with
all of the legally-CD-able distfiles; for people who
don't have the (cheap) bandwidth to stay up to date
with cvsup...



-Pat