[tex-live] (no subject)

[Karl Berry]

Hi Michael and all -

If you or Boris or anyone wants to produce a distribution on USB, by all
means, go for it. We could sell it through the user groups or make it an
optional extra for members. Whatever.

I wouldn't try to integrate it with the current image creation at all.
(which is basically a script that sets a bunch of options and runs
mkisofs, or rather xorriso in mkisofs mode). Creating something for USB
would surely have to be quite different.

Most platforms are about 150MB. That adds up to a lot of packages. It
might be that we freed up enough space last year for some years to come.
We never know until it comes time to build the final DVD image.

No "features" have ever been removed to make space. The reason that
removing platform binary sets is attractive is that it can be done
without impacting anything else -- the available platform list is
already computed dynamically by the installer. Whereas removing anything
else (say, a huge font package) implies many more infrastructure
changes. I don't recall a single user complaint that the removal of the
less common platforms has caused a problem in practice ...

Archiving for posterity doesn't seem like an issue to me. All TL
distributions are available online and will be forever (as far as I'm
concerned). If someone absolutely needs some old distribution and
doesn't have the bandwidth to download, they can ask someone who does.
TUG also has old DVDs for most years (of zero interest to the general
populace), and I imagine other user groups do too.

The feedback I've gotten is that relatively few members actually use the
DVD. Thus I'm not excited about going to the trouble and expense of
making a second DVD with the removed platform binaries. There would be
no way to integrate it into the installation, for sure.

I heartily agree with your comments about public standards.

Best,
Karl