14 DAY TRIAL // Debian's Steve McIntyre posted a very long and interesting message on the Debian mailing list about the summary of the Debian CD BoF meeting that took place at the DebConf15 conference.
Therefore, we report today that the unanimous decision was to no longer generate CD sets, which were distributed in the form of ISO images, for upcoming releases of the Debian GNU/Linux operating system, starting with the anticipated Debian GNU/Linux 9.0 (Stretch) release. This applies for all of Debian GNU/Linux's supported hardware architectures.
Debian was one of the last open-source projects to offer installation ISO images of the Linux kernel-based operating system on up to eight CDs for each supported architecture. The CD-1 ISO images with various desktop environments, including KDE, Xfce, and LXDE, will also disappear.
Additionally, it would appear that the Live CDs images will be gone as well. The only thing that will remain in the /iso-cd folders will be Network Install ISO images. As expected, the Debian Project will continue to deliver DVD and Blu-Ray ISO images of the Debian GNU/Linux operating system.
"I'm planning to basically stop making *CD* sets for new builds (testing/stretch onwards)," says Steve McIntyre. "What do I mean by that? We'll stop building full CD sets of all of Debian (up to 90 per architecture) for new releases, and testing. And we'll also kill the differing CD1 options for different desktops.We'll continue building DVD and BD images."
Older Debian GNU/Linux releases will still receive CD sets
Future maintenance releases of the currently supported Debian GNU/Linux operating systems, which includes the Wheezy and Jessie branches, will continue to receive CD sets and Live CD ISO images, despite the fact that the Debian Project thinks that nobody is using them anymore, which we have to admit that it is quite true, as people don't have the time and patience to download so many ISO images.
The recently released Debian GNU/Linux 9.0 (Stretch) Alpha 3 build is also the last to be distributed with CD sets. The next milestones will only be available for download as DVD and Blu-Ray ISO images for all the supported hardware architectures.