I’ve gotten a lot of mixed feedback on this one over the years
When we zip release (aka R1/Beta3) ISO’s, people complain we should offer them uncompressed. When we offer uncompressed ISO’s, people complain we should offer them compressed via zip.
Considerations:
A lot of things will let you paste an ISO URL into them for “direct access”. These things don’t support zip’ed ISO’s (think cloud hosts, virtual KVM’s, Vagrant, image writers, etc)
Uncompressing a zip generally requires the size of the zip plus the size of the extracted media on your system. Downloading an ISO directly requires less local space.
The R1/Beta4 iso will be around 1.5G uncompressed
The R1/Beta4 iso will be around 1.1G compressed via zip maximum compression.
Offering both zip and iso may confuse users. (keep in mind that makes 4 available downloads for r1/beta4… two architectures, two image types)
Most Linux distros offer only uncompressed iso downloads
Note: Nightly isn’t included in this. We will continue to ZIP nightly images no matter what… there are just too many. We’re talking strictly “stable release images”
i think the issue is bandwidth, and cost of bandwidth, for the org and those who download, a compressed ISO saves for both, so long as disk space isn’t a premium.
This is why historically we did zip them (cut down on bandwidth, etc) A year or two when I did R1/beta3 i got a lot of feedback about offering uncompressed instead. We even offered 7z compressed media at one point around r1/beta2.
This time around we have seen several folks ask for compressed again… so i’m letting this poll decide it once and for all lol.
that would technically defeat the purpose of uncompressed direct http access though.
As a fun side note, i upgraded our ci/cd builders this week. We can now push release images or nightlies to one or more of a wide range of hosting providers.
I voted against compression. As much as I like saving download time for 400 MB of empty disk space, normal zip isn’t the tool for it. Being able to use a Linux style stream filter like GZip or better, .xz where a single, streamed file download can be piped through a decompression filter seems a better use of a POSIX toolchain.
We used to have the downloads (nightlies & releases) in .xz compression format which reduced the size and bandwidth by half, then all of the sudden it was decided to drop that format in favor of zip which is clearly less efficient.
Well I think that for a 100MB of data they should stay in the ISO, as it’s a live system, and can help find Haiku an easier ststem for non native english speakers.
Maybe it can be decided not to install them, once decided a specific language. But for 100MB I think it’s not worth it
If the worry is about download size, a properly configured web server can serve a file with http headers that will make the client decompress on the fly (“transfer-encoding: gzip” or similar)
Why should English be allowed in? Let’s be equal to everyone, all human readable text should be removed and Haiku should only output numbers until you download a language!
If size exceeds a CD size why not also include as option few carefully chosen apps? I mean enough to provide a good live experience without internet connexion.
Aside of that, we could have a ‘net install’ CD iso like most linux distros have. In this case, sources don’t have to be included, right?
It would be enough that the localized versions come out only for the official releases, not for the nightly…
For convenience, the group of language and so iso, divided by “continent” could be done, in order not to multiply everything too much.
I want to highlight that it is much rarer for localizations to contain bugs…
All localizations also could be available on haikudeport.
Finally, for the installation you can choose only the desired languages…
