[CentOS-devel] Dual Layer DVD iso for 6.3 / 5.8

Mon Feb 6 22:30:01 UTC 2012
Lamar Owen <lowen at pari.edu>

On Monday, February 06, 2012 02:40:13 PM Karanbir Singh wrote:
> - Should we consider doing CD isos as well as dual layer DVD ones ?

Dual layer single ISO would be nice for a number of reasons, but not so nice for other reasons.

Nice, in that a USB key of 8GB or so could just have the one ISO loaded; 
Nice, in that all DVD-ROMS are supposed to be able to read dual-layer media;
Nice, in that a single DVD can handle things physically;
Nice, in that only a single ISO needs to be mounted for virtualization, which can simplify VM guest installs;

Not so nice, in that dual layer rewritables aren't available (to my knowledge at least), and when I do burn a DVD I tend to burn to rewritable media;
Not so nice, in that dual layer media is more expensive;
Not so nice, in that it takes that much longer to download when you don't need the second DVD.

CD's on the other hand would be nice all around for servers that don't have DVD-ROMS but are still capable of running C6 (I have a few 1U IBM's in that category for which DVD-ROM drives are scarce, and modifying a laptop thin-line DVD-ROM is difficult, since the slot for the drive is thinner than any other thinline drive I've seen
 
> - Should we consider only having these two media formats available via
> torrent ?

Whee, I hope not.  Torrent is good and all for many things, but there are places where it's not going to work.  I'd let mirrors opt-in to CD and DVD-DL images, as long as the master mirror has sufficient drive space.

Or, at one time there was a script out there to build DVD iso's from the CD iso's; if a quick script can build the DL iso from the two existing DVD iso's, or split out to multiple CD isos, and the user can download the two regular DVD isos and run the script/tool (revisor is used by SL for 'sites' and is a pretty good tool for this sort of thing).  For that matter, revisor, along with the repos and jigdo files, can handle all of the tasks mentioned quite handily.