F12 No Split CDs Proposal

Overview
Stop creating and publishing the 25 CDs that comprise the Fedora Desktop release.

Mirroring
The entire Fedora 11 release as sent to the mirrors is ~143GB. Of that, CD and DVD ISOs represent ~34GB; the split media CD ISOs represent ~15.5GB of that. As most of the rest of that 143GB is all hardlinked, we’re really only transferring out all these ISO files. 10% of the disk space, and 45% of the time/bandwidth needed to get a release out to the mirrors, for about 2% of the user base, and declining.

Few Users
BitTorrent downloaders of the split CD sets have been decreasing. F9: 6.32%. F10 4.58% F11 so far: 2.2%.

Options
0. No change. Continue to produce the 25 split CDs for the Fedora Desktop edition and post them to the mirrors and torrent.fedoraproject.org.

1. Produce the 25 split CDs, but do not post them to the mirrors. Use alternative distribution methods (torrent.fedoraproject.org, alt.fedoraproject.org).

2. Produce split CDs only for i386 and ppc, but not x86_64. Debate producing split CDs for source.

3. Do not produce the 25 split CDs at all. Fedora Unity will produce them if at all possible.

Scope

 * Release Engineering processes
 * Master Mirror
 * Torrent server
 * Documentation

Comments?
http://domsch.com/blog/?p=85 for more thoughts and comments.

Owner
Matt Domsch