[tex-live] (no subject)

[George N. White III]

On Wed, 19 Sep 2018 at 06:54, Zdenek Wagner <zdenek.wagner at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> st 19. 9. 2018 v 11:45 odesílatel Martin Sievers <martin at dante.de> napsal:
> >
> > Am 19.09.2018 um 11:37 schrieb George N. White III:
> > > On Tue, 18 Sep 2018 at 19:44, Reinhard Kotucha <reinhard.kotucha at web.de> wrote:
> > >>
> > >> On 2018-09-18 at 15:45:01 -0400, Michael Shell wrote:
> > >>
> > >>  > Sandisk 16GB USB flash drives can now be had for $5.49:
> > >>
> > >> Still much too expensive in order to offer them for free to members of
> > >> TeX user groups.  DVDs are very cheap.
> > >
> > > You have to buy a new DVD every year.    USB flash drives could be
> > > returned for updating.   Local user groups could do this with disk to
> > > disk copying.
> >
> > To be honest, I am not convinced, that 2000 members of DANTE e.V. (or at
> > least a significant part) will return their USB flash drives. Secondly,
> > I don't want our secretary or anybody else to copy the data to 2000 USB
> > flash drives.

The economics depends on reducing the 2000 DVD's to the number that are
actually used.  Commercial popularity of DVD's for videos and technical manuals,
etc.  once made DVD copying businesses practical.   Now some techical manuals
are distributed in the form of a tablet that replaces a stack of DVD's
while others
are available online.

Many of the same companies that provide mass DVD copying and mailing are
now doing USB flash drives.   See
https://www.newcyberian.com/usb-flash-drive.html
for an example.

> You will have to inform them that they have to return it and how long
> will you wait?
> When I use "dd" to move and ISO image of Live Linux, it takes 6
> minutes for 1.6 GB.
> If TL has > 8 GB and DANTE has 2000 members, imagine how long it will take.
> In addition, if VFAT is mounted on Linux, all 8.3 names appear in
> uppercase while longer names appear as they are. It might cause problems.

Moving to USB will not be a simple project, especially since the goal
is to include
less popular systems so relies on testing by others.

> > And again, we are talking about prices less than 0,50 EUR per DVD and
> > year for producing and shipping. Just shipping the USB flash drive back
> > to our members would be more expansive.

DVD's provide a durable collection of older versions for those who have DVD
readers.   USB keys tend to collect malware, so recycling is not something that
can be done by ordinary users, and there will be more failures than for DVD's.



--
George N. White III