[sf-lug] Ubuntu, GPartEd, Bad Luck with Blue Collar Linux-Help! etc.

[Rick Moen]

Pardon me, but I need to revisit something, because I think somehow 
it's not yet been made clear:

Quoting Bobbie Sellers (bliss-sf4ever at dslextreme.com):

[About point releases of the Official Debian installer ISOs:]

>     Well it is not a matter of throwing out old isos but a matter
> of having a reasonably recent .iso file
> to save excessive downloading to get to the latest update.
     ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

{scratches head}

No, seriously, it really makes makes no difference.

By the time the Release Manager freezes and then packages and releases a
new point release, it's alread significantly out of date, in that there
will be a relatively small but significant number of package updates for
the current Stable branch in the online apt repositories.  If, instead,
you started with the prior point release ISO, or the n-2 point-release
ISO, or the n-3 ISO, your installed system would require about the same
updates from the online apt repositories.  It's mostly the same
subgroup of packages that get a slow dribble of updates during a release
cycle, and you do _not_ need to get all the intervening update packages,
only the latest of each.  Maybe starting with the 9.8 ISO today instead
of the 9.0 ISO means your system is going to need 18 initial update
packages instead of 17.  Does this merit all new ISOs?  You be the
judge.

Note that this system'll get maybe 5-6 update packages if the user does
'apt-get update && apt-get update' every week from that point forward --
or 7-8 packages every month if that's the maintenance interval.

Guesstimated numbers are from memory, with the necessary disclaimer that
I abandoned Debian-Stable as uninteresting a long time ago.