[tex-live] ctan on dvd

Karl Berry karl at freefriends.org
Wed Apr 16 18:58:44 CEST 2003


Hello Volker and all,

The plans for TL itself (one compressed/installable cd, one live cd)
sound good to me.  However, I'd like to discuss the CTAN delivery a
little more:

It's unquestionably true that one dvd will be much cheaper to produce
and mail than N cd's (not sure if N=3 or N=4 this year).

However, I wonder, how much use would such a dvd actually get?  Volker,
I recall that your poll of the membership showed that relatively few
people had dvd's.  Is that right? That is true in general, as far as I
know.  And I would guess that most people who have dvd drives also have
good Internet connections, and therefore just use live CTAN.

On the other hand, people with bad internet connections (for instance,
Han The Thanh in Vietnam) are the ones who would most benefit from a
ctan dump on media, it seems to me.  And they are precisely the ones who
are least likely to have a dvd drive.

So, I wonder about making ctan available on cd, but not sending it to
everyone by default, but only on request.  That way, the people who can
most benefit will still have it, but we won't have the expense of
producing thousands of cd's and/or dvd's that don't get used.

Thoughts?

Thanks,
karl


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