install

[Alex Zbyslaw]

Aryeh M. Friedman wrote:

>>complaints are not accompanied by solutions. The installer has been
>>a bikeshed for many years; everyone seems to know what color it
>>should be, how many windows it should have, how many doors to
>>install, what type of lighting it needs, how many penguins should
>>be accommodated in the rafters, and what relative orientation it
>>should have to the earth's magnetic field; yet the most vocal of
>>these people naturally have no contributions to make towards the
>>installer's actual codebase.
>>    
>>
>
>I think the only change needed for the time being (immediate fix) is
>to move to DVD being the prefered medium (the rest can wait)
>  
>
This is *not* a fix for most FreeBSD users; rather it would be a 
retrograde step.  If you have a decent enough internet connection to 
download a DVD, then you will use less bandwidth by downloading CD 1 and 
installing all your software from packages or ports.

If you install more than a week after the medium was created, then 
you'll also get up-to-date versions of that software rather that 
whatever version happened to be current when the CD was made (or the 
port freeze went into effect).

DVDs might be the norm for Linux distributions like Fedora where the 
versions of all the software you get are defined by the particular 
release, but with FreeBSD and ports/packages that has never been the case.

For users with poor internet, then yes, I can see the advantage of a DVD 
over 4 CDs, but is that a majority requiring an immediate fix and a 
change of preferred medium?  I think not.

Me, even with several reasonably fancy PCs, have no DVD burning 
capability whatsoever, and I doubt I'm alone in that.

--Alex