On Wed, Dec 12, 2018 at 02:40:11PM +0000, Roger Leigh wrote:

[cut]

> installation methods. Looking at
> https://mirror.netzspielplatz.de/devuan/devuan_ascii_rc/installer-iso/ for
> example. Do the separate CD and DVD images have much value given that they
> only hold the tiniest fraction of the whole archive? Or is just one netinst
> or dvd image sufficient for all needs (perhaps combined with a local mirror
> or caching proxy server if you are doing multiple installations)? Could the
> live images be further combined with the install images like Ubuntu does? If
> you look at http://releases.ubuntu.com/18.04.1/ and
> http://releases.ubuntu.com/18.04.1/ you can see that there's just one server
> and desktop iso image per platform per release. It's pretty simple when
> there's a single obvious choice to make, and they clearly thought how to
> reduce the complexity as much as possible. (Note: none of this is a
> criticism of the Devuan ascii images; the collection is quite impressive.)
>

Please find below the stats of the actual number of downloads of each
ASCII image according to https://files.devuan.org in the last 14 days
(without taking into account the other 24 ISO mirrors):

- netinst        : 149
- DVD ISO        : 135
- CDROM ISO      :  99
- desktop live   : 180
- minimal-live   :  77
- embedded (ARM) : 283
- virtual        :  72
----------------------
Total            : 995

(yes, these are actual downloads not "file peeks", i.e., return code
"200" with matching size).


And please find below a more detailed explanation on the motivations
behind each image:

- netinst exist because it's the preferred way of installing minimal
systems and servers;

- the install DVD ISO exists because there are many users asking for a
single medium that they can download once and install many times
(e.g., due to bandwidth restrictions), and supports more than just
XFCE;

- the 3-cdrom set exists because we had many users asking for a
smaller footprint (again, bandwidth is not cheap everywhere) set of
images that they could use to install offline with a minimal XFCE
desktop;

- desktop-live exists because many people asked for a live Devuan
version which could be easily tried and installed. This is also the
preferred Devuan flavour used in reviews;

- minimal-live was thought as a recovery tool and has a specific focus
on accessibility (especially regarding visually-impaired and blind
users), and provides a full-featured console-based setup;

- so many embedded images exist because ARM vendors have not agreed on
a common standard;

- qcow, vagrant, and vcox images exist because many Devuan users like
to have ready-to-use images for their VMs;

- on top of those, there are also the usual mini.iso and netboot
images, although not advertised on files.devuan.org.


Quite likely, each single user would just prefer one of those images
and ask themselves "oh why on Earth there are so many, indeed?". I
actually use almost exclusively the mini.iso or the netboot
images.

The answer is that there is no single Devuan user, and no single
Devuan use-case, as the statistics above confirm. What is perfect for
somebody, is dumb or useless for somebody else, and vice-versa. The
whole point is to make an effort to look at the bigger picture:

Since Devuan is one of the few dpkg-based systemd-free distributions
around, we have the *obligation* to cater for as many use cases as
possible.

HTH

KatolaZ

-- 
[ ~.,_  Enzo Nicosia aka KatolaZ - Devuan -- Freaknet Medialab  ]  
[     "+.  katolaz [at] freaknet.org --- katolaz [at] yahoo.it  ]
[       @)   http://kalos.mine.nu ---  Devuan GNU + Linux User  ]
[     @@)  http://maths.qmul.ac.uk/~vnicosia --  GPG: 0B5F062F  ] 
[ (@@@)  Twitter: @KatolaZ - skype: katolaz -- github: KatolaZ  ]