Development/Ideas/LiveDVD

From Mandriva Community Wiki

With the release of 2007 Spring a lot of One images were omitted, effectively rendering a lot of translations useless and One not interesting for usage due to some lacks.

• Cons:
  • Less translations
  • x86_64 version not created for extras cd
  • Only KDE on extras cd
  • Only i586, KDE One disk 1 being pressed
• Pros:
  • Less images to maintain

All these issues will actually affect most people, at least for those wanting a specific language.

What Mandriva gains so much of respect from is the freedom of choice, it's the only mainstream distro which actually offers KDE as default while also being desktop agnostic by supporting GNOME equally, same goes for the excellent internationalization efforts where Mandriva excels! Cutting back on these things might just have a really bad effect from community and contributors, translations being done for no purpose, peoples language being discriminated etcetc. Also doing so will hurt our credibility (ie. just like lindvd disappeared in 2007 spring).

As it's quite obvious that it's quite a pain to maintain > 10 different images for every combination of language, desktop & arch..

Doing a dual arch dvd with both KDE & GNOME (maybe even XFCE++ too?) with all translations wouldn't increase the need for maintainance that much and could probably kill off some cd images (ie. keep only i586 kde & gnome images), reducing the maintainance needed. Also size restriction wouldn't have such an impact making us able to include the things that the community actually wants (and finally listen to it, which Mandriva has been criticized for so long not doing).

Dual arch is maybe not that important and it would also increase size the most, adding all translations and other desktops would probably not increase size that much, after all, a dvd image doesn't have to be 4gb, just adding these might not even increase size above 1gb. One option could also to include only x86_64 kernel(++?) to still allow for install of x86_64 version even if running userspace is i586.

For One disks being pressed this would be very nice too as i586 kde disk 1 won't be of preference for ~75% of our users, pressing a DVD that everyone would want to use would make these disks a lot more usable. (Might cost more to press dvds over cds?)

One problem though, many LUGS, associations and countries don't own a DVD player but rather a CD player. Thus, creating and pressing only DVDs will impede us to be used in various countries and by various LUGs (even in France).

In conclusion, there's a *lot* of benefits from doing a live dvd, but some cons include space and bandwidth issue, along with non compatibility with our prescriptors around the world (install parties may suffer from that). (If hurting mirrors and making them unhappy, maybe only distribute through future EDOS channels if an issue?).

</wildramblings>