~kanarip

The Fedora Project has put installation media CDs with it's back to the wall, has loaded and aimed it's guns, and is ready to pull the trigger in 5 months. Here's the start of the thread on fedora-devel-list.

As you probably know, Fedora Unity releases Fedora once or twice or trice after the general availability for a given release, in the form of Re-Spins. We've included CD Installation media in our Re-Spins even if the official Fedora distribution didn't have them generally available (which was the case for Fedora 7 and Fedora 8).

The discussion on fedora-devel-list right now seems to evolve around simple statistics, but...

Regrettably, Fedora Unity lacks the statistics on how many times our Re-Spin is downloaded. If, at all, the numbers that we have are complete and trustworthy, then these are the amazing numbers.

Note that you should never trust statistics.

Our numbers at http://spinner.fedoraunity.org:6969/ show a grand total of over 5000 complete downloads (those of Fedora 8 not included), and over 22000 pending downloads... This I suspect is a number so wrong... If you believe this number let me give you another shock: Santa Claus does not exist and has never existed.

The other number says over 17.000 torrent clients have downloaded our products. Now this number I could argue could be true... but I simply don't know, so I'll let you make up your own mind.

The statistics we don't have include your Jigdo downloads for every release that we do (and have done with the help of Jigdo since Fedora 7 or so), but it's obvious that our Re-Spins are downloaded a lot. An awful lot, even. Even if the numbers I refer to are not at all true... given the amount of feedback that we get, the amount of requests for a new Re-Spin even just after a new Fedora release comes out ("Can you please, please include the 0-day updates???"), I suspect the number of users is in the thousands.

We, Fedora Unity, obviously provide Re-Spins as a service to the community. Those that like the pie, get the pie, then eat the pie. We're not as much concerned with the number of downloads... For us, it's a matter of quality, not quantity.

Quality in how you experience a Fedora installation a few months and a few hundred updates later. Quality in enabling fixes to be backported in to the installer images so that Fedora actually improves and the release matures or stabilizes. Not the quantity of hard numbers we can't trust -the number of downloads through one method or another.

Ergo, in the discussion on whether the Fedora Project should re-consider it's decision to include CD media in it's release once again, after re-including CD media in the release with Fedora 9 following some pressure from within the community, I can only argue that the numbers shown are not entirely representative, and that Fedora Unity will not bend over to lame argumentation, and Fedora Unity will continue providing this service to the community. The question is, how far will the Fedora Project let Fedora Unity do so through the Fedora Project proper? Now that this question has been asked, I'm wondering what the answer would look like. Mean time, if you have purpose for CD media, I suggest you join the discussion and have your voice be heard. Now.