Jigdo - A Professional Letter to Mike McGrath

[Jeroen van Meeuwen]

Michael DeHaan wrote:
> Jeroen van Meeuwen wrote:
>> Mike McGrath wrote:
>>>>  and we were going to
>>>>> judge jigdo a success if a certain % (compared to bittorrent) use 
>>>>> jigdo.  What % would that be?
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Jigdo would in this case be particularly useful to those with a 
>>>> local mirror as they have 99% of the content already (90% if you 
>>>> have F9T3?). Because it is particularly useful to some, and 
>>>> completely weird and strange for others, the number of users that 
>>>> will use it if BitTorrent is an alternative wouldn't be a very good 
>>>> indicator to see if it is actually a viable distribution method for 
>>>> the whole of Fedora, neither is it the goal for these proposals.
>>>
>>> I'm talking specifically about people going to the get-fedora page 
>>> and clicking on the torrent link vs the jigdo link.  Out of every 100 
>>> people, how many people will click on the jigdo link?
>>>
>>
>> Given the choice to download, say, the Fedora 9 i386 vanilla DVD, 
>> frankly, I expect only people that know Jigdo, or want to get to know 
>> Jigdo as it may have some benefits for them, and want to use it, are 
>> going to use it, so in all my optimism:
>>
>> roughly 10 out of a 100.
> 
> I would venture less.   As a former Debian user (and knowing other 
> Debian users), our favorite install system was always the ~100 MB net 
> install image, which we can do for Fedora already (though it's not 100 MB)
> 

Assuming you do have a network connection, like the example above; What 
would you want to do if there's no Jigdo, but you do have the Fedora 9 
DVD, and you want/need the CD version too? Download another ~4GB of ISO 
images?

How about off-line?

It's fairly simple to create the Jigdo files and host them. Let's try it 
and get the real numbers, then decide if it's valuable enough for all of 
us to continue distributing installation media with.

> Spins are perhaps interesting for users that don't do minimal 
> net-installs, and don't want to build their system with yum later, but 
> jigdo is something that advanced users would use.   They seem to be two 
> different groups.
> 
> Jigdo did not seem to be very popular among anyone I talked to once they 
> figured out the minimal install images were available.
> 

We on the other hand have hundreds -if not thousands- of users download 
the CD version of Fedora 7 and Fedora 8 while supposedly they are in 
possession of the DVD images already.

Kind regards,

Jeroen van Meeuwen
-kanarip