On Fri, 7 Jun 2002, Toby Fisher wrote: > Sheesh! 6 disks? Why? What's wrong with the current root disks? Why > can't they leave them in place for backwards compatibility and those who > want/need to use them? Here is how I understand the situation. The way root disks normally work is that you boot a compressed ramdisk. That is, a root disk is nothing more than a gzipped filesystem written directly to a disk. The other option is to boot multiple uncompressed disks as a ramdisk. For whatever reason, attempting to make the latest root disks caused the compressed size to exceed 1.44MB. Since the only choices are one compressed disk or several uncompressed ones, the result is 5 root disks plus the main boot disk. As to why they just don't use the old one, they've reworked the pkgtool and I think, the version has to match on the disk and the CD or something. I do know that it uses longer file names that indicate the version of the package you are installing and what platform it is compiled for. However, I agree that they could surely get the root disk smaller by cutting out some garbage and using older versions of utilities. For example, why does an installer disk need telnet? Maybe you should ask Pat yourself about this. I personally think that there will be enough outcry that he'll have to do something before the final release since there have been a few flair ups on Usenet over this issue.
