Oversized warnings in nightlies need to be more conspicuous

On Mon, Sep 17, 2007 at 05:10:27AM -0000, Scott Ritchie wrote:
> The current way of "warning" the tester that it is oversized is to
> create a file amidst the huge list of useless file ending in .OVERSIZED.
> It is very easy to ignore this file, or even to see it and not know what
> it means, since it's next to a bunch of other things you will not even
> want to click on.

You may not have a need for them, but the other files there are far from
useless. Developers do use them, and regularly.

Most of the other files in that directory have corresponding text which
describes what they do. This would be useful for .OVERSIZED as well.

> I think the simplest way to avoid this is to just put a warning up at the top of the automatically generated download page in big letters. Something like "Warning: This image is oversized and will not fit onto a standard CDR. You may still use it to test burning to a virtual machine or DVDR, however."

This is not straightforward to do, since the HTML is static (it's identical
for every build). I'm not sure that it's worthwhile, as there are a lot of
other ways in which a daily build can be faulty, because they are
automatically generated and not tested before release. If you need a
development build which is known to work, our recommendation is to use a
milestone build (such as Tribe 5).

--
 - mdz

I imagined the nightly builds were supposed to be used by more hardware testers, and that means community people rather than developers. Someone who thinks "Gutsy is close enough to beta, I want to see if I can help test it with my hardware." That tester then downloads the nightly rather than the nearly month-old Tribe 5 - all he needs is an iso, or possibly a torrent.

Perhaps I'm vastly overestimating the number of hardware testers, though. But we really won't know they're there unless they have a problem and report it.

As an aside, do the nightly torrents get enough seeders to be more useful than the direct links?

While Matt is right that there are other problems that can break daily builds (though this is one of the simplest to detect), he's mistaken that the HTML is static - it's automatically generated and so this wasn't too hard to fix. You can see the result at http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/daily-live/20080929/, at least until it gets purged.

revno: 716
committer: Colin Watson <email address hidden>
branch nick: cdimage
timestamp: Mon 2008-09-29 22:13:57 +0100
message:
  display a warning for oversized images (thanks to Scott Ritchie for suggested wording; LP: #140049)

Can you recommend also usb-creator instead of DVD burning?
Much easier to do, less cost, size independent.

I've changed it to mention USB drives too, but this is an error message and is not the place for software recommendations, so please don't ask me for more detail there.

I was going to ask for a wiki link for it, but I guess I better shut up, then.

I'm not trying to make you "shut up", just to notice that under normal circumstances users won't see this message! It just isn't a good place for extensive documentation.