Welcome to DebConf Video Etherpad! Primary data is in gobby at $ gobby infinote://gobby.debian.org/debconf22/bof/debian-installer Comments here may be merged there afterwards This pad text is synchronized as you type, so that everyone viewing this page sees the same text. This allows you to collaborate seamlessly on documents! To get started click the 👥 button in the top/bottom right and log in. Get involved with Etherpad at https://etherpad.org Personal opinions below from amacater - Andy - as the other member of the install media and testing team with Sledge,RattusRattus and Isy. A few things that have come up generally: Writing media to USB sticks Lots of people still have problems appreciating that we have isohybrid images that can be copied to a USB stick and "just work" at least for i386 and amd64. We still get questions on how to boot/how to copy on places like debian-user at least once a month or so. I'm not sure how we get this one across. Bigger images We get lots of folk wanting bigger images. There's probably a law of diminishing returns here. The larger you make an image, the harder it is to download in one piece reliably, especially in areas of the world that have low bandwidth / high latency. [Getting used to high bandwidth is a first world problem]. I (personally) think that something bigger than 16G is not worthwhile for us to do at all, unless as .jigdo though the 16G physical file is very useful if you have it, especially for an offline machine or network.. Thomas Schmitt and Zhang Boyang between them did a nice job on "bigger than Blu-Ray" recently, though "All of Debian on one disk / one archive" We still want people wanting "all of Debian on one disk" for whatever reason - maybe for carrying it to a single isolated machine or network. What should we do? Building large images Large images are easy using jigdo/jigit if you have a local mirror handy - I think the members of the images team are the only ones that do :-) RattusRattus suggested that we produce a "Build your own image" program to do this for people. Jigdo and jigit-mkimage are definitely a good way to go to get large images quickly. Media sized for physical media? We make netinsts for i386 / amd64, the first DVD image is sized for exactly 4G so it will fit on a physical DVD. Single CD images which include a desktop are gone - though people still ask for them occasionally. Can we afford to move to just netinst and stop sizing for physical media? Notably, other Linux distributions now have a 10G "DVD" Meta-question: when does physical media die :-) Ubuntu-like features that people mention sometimes Do we want an OEM mode in the installer? Do we want an Ubuntu-like "live medium and squashfs/initrd to install from" which is significantly larger? Who builds what? We have: live images built by one person, WSL images for Microsoft built by one person, cloud images by another team, Raspberry Pi images which are officially unofficial - and media images built by Sledge and co. Derivatives/pure blends ???? - who knows. Perhaps we could do with some consolidation, so that there's ONE Debian source for "official images." [Debian 1.3 spelt this as Oficial on all branded media :-) ] This would help people wanting verifiable sources / chasing supply chain verification etc. Testing We end up testing amd64 images / i386 images with any point release and major release. It takes time - can some be automated - fil offered help. How in depth is media testing? Live images get minimal testing. We don't do any testing for ARM SBC, for example, or Pi builds - at what point does the effort just come down to "it boots - ship it"? Live images Personal suggestion: Could we have a "build your own live image" system based on the standard image and adding a desktop? Multiple live images differing only in desktop seem a bit wasteful. [In an install with a standard installer, it's a question of tasksel to change desktops]. Live images - tooling and personnel Live images need more people behind them or they're dead images - difficult to find effort for them. highvoltage and rclobus and?? rclobus: I'm working on re-activating live images, but progress has slowed down since I started my new day job. Toolchain and build system - obsolescence and different waysof producing live images ... this needs sorting or live images need abandoning Controversial: Calamares - why? Calamares is dead upstream at the moment - https://euroquis.nl/calamares/2022/05/21/calamares-farewell.html and https://euroquis.nl/calamares/2022/05/29/calamares-handoff.html - either we put significant effort into it or it needs to go, in my (biased) opinion. Derivatives and blends With the exception of the dedication of Schweer to Debian-Edu - where are they? seconded - Schweer works tirelesley on the Debian-Edu project, we don't see anyone else We'd love if Blends would be supported! Thanks for trying your luck on tasksel anyway! I agree that we do not need images for every single Blend. Some pointer to an easy way to install a Blend somewhere in the install process would be great ... be it via tasksel or something better. Is it a option to have one meta-package per blend which will install a kind of "basic setup of a blend"? Regarding shipping "all desktops": We should specifically not ship desktops which do not work easily out of the box.. I had quite bad experiences with lxde where naive users would have quite some trouble to start with. My bug reports to lxde people were not dealt in a way I would consider helpful. I think selecting Gnome / KDE and some "small but maintained desktop" should be sufficient