Partial retraction about CD media

[Kyle]

Currently Arch has only one image, which is a dual-architecture CD, and
it is trending larger. I believe last month's snapshot was the only one
that I haven't seen grow by at least 10MB over the past year. Yes, I
can remember when the dual-architecture CD was under 500MB, but that
was probably almost 3 years ago, and we can never go back to that size
and still maintain a dual-architecture image. My guess is that Arch
will do one of two things once its image exceeds 700MB. Either it will
switch to recommending burning to a DVD or writing to USB media, or it
will switch back to two images, one for i686 and one for x86_64. The
second option is far less likely, as it makes little sense from the
point of view of the Arch developers. This does however explain why the
iso is as large as it is, since you are not downloading an image for a
single architecture. Instead, with Arch, you download both i686 and
x86_64 in a single iso file, and the correct kernel and applications
are loaded at boot time. It greatly simplifies things, but does make th
e image nearly twice as large as a single architecture would be.

The only other way I can see to boot Arch is to boot it over the
network. While this seems good in theory, everything happens prior to
loading a Linux kernel, and therefore, it most likely can't be made to
speak. The only offline image is the single iso on the download page,
and TalkingArch by definition must do what Arch itself is doing, only
adding packages and configurations to make it support speech and
braille.
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