Debian "Lenny" - new record?!

[BlueJayofEvil]

My jaw almost dropped to the floor when I read this weeks Distrowatch Weekly. This is why:

Every new stable release of Debian GNU/Linux breaks a few records and "Lenny" will be no exception. With over 25,000 packages for 13 supported architectures, the upcoming release of the world's largest Linux distribution will come on 414 CDs or 64 DVDs. But now, for the first time ever, Lenny will also be released as a set of 25 GB Blu-ray discs: "We are now producing some Blu-ray images alongside the existing CD and DVD images with each weekly 'Lenny' build. As a standard Blu-ray disc will hold up to 25 GB of data, that means that, for the first time in several years, users should be able to fit all of the packages for one architecture on a single disc. The downside of adding yet another image type is that potentially we could use up huge amounts of disk space and bandwidth on our central servers and mirrors to accommodate them."

(emphasis mine)

Although I'm not sure why they didn't mention BitTorrent as a solution to the last sentence there?

[Stupot]

BitTorrent would help out with the bandwidth, but it would still take more hard drive space.

Also...HOLY COW!

[Thev00d00]

Remember that for all intesive purposes you have to divide that number by 3, as you have package, package-dev and package-headers/themes/extra etc

[miksuh]

Remember that for all intesive purposes you have to divide that number by 3, as you have package, package-dev and package-headers/themes/extra etc

No that's not true. You can't make any calculations like that. There is -dev package only for the libraries. And there is no such as 'package-headers', headers are part of the library's -dev package. There is no such as theme packages for the packages either. Themes are desktop environment specific and all programs can use them. Most of the programs are just one package. Sure many programs consists of couple of packages, but not all, not even close. You also have to remember that one library package is usually used by many programs. So it's not really that simple as you say.

[Stupot]

Hmm. I'm sensing a Debian fanboy in the house!

Regardless of how many packages vs. applications they are offering (not to mention that having a large quantity of applications does not mean that the number of quality applications goes up), it's amazing how large the number is. That's a lot of hard drive space being used somewhere. It kinda shows that linux is always growing.