At 01:52 AM 3/24/96 -0500, Ben Holiday wrote:
I would plan to put unix/dos/mac all on one CD. I'm thinking that realistically I can expect 50 megs or so. Possibly as much as 100 if I find a TON of wonderful text.
I burned one such CD this last fall. Oh, well, it wasn't for publishing, although I thought of that at the time. It was mainly to be able to move with me all my data when I switched positions. I included all the Cypherpunks archives, and several international FTP crypto sites in full (ya know, the italian, australian, english, pgp, etc... places). It was well over your "50 megs". And I would find that pretty more useful (if I hadn't it already). :-) Oh, I'm lying. I also did a "purged" version to remove duplicated packages first, when I didn't know if I would have enough sapce in the few CDs I had to burn in the few days I had left. I seem to remember that wasn't as big and maybe in the range that you mentioned. But it was compressed, and hence its usefulnes now is somewhat less since I have to expand everything if I want to get it. I was filling the CDs with other "important to me" stuff, and wanted to save space, but having the space available I don't see any reason not to expand the material. What I'd suggest is a compilation of all main archives, purged from duplications, rearranged rationally (I have it just in the original hierarchies) and all expanded for direct access. If you add to that executables for most packages compiled for a few popular platforms (Mac, PC, Linux and FreeBSD come to mind), I'd bet that you'd get a far greater amount of space. But that's a lot of additional work though. I know from experience. It might do for a very nice cypherpunk project. Although, there still remains the "trustfulness" of the product: how can the final user know that the sources, executables, key databases, etc... have not been tampered with? From the original archives one has the truth one poses on them, but from a copy, one needs to trust the copier. And if it became a multi-person project, all the people involved... But it's well worth a thought o two. If it helps you, my CDs are probing now invaluable to me. jr