What's the difference between Debian installation CD and Debian DVD?

Question

There is a major size difference and I can't find a detailed description on Debian website about the content of both .

Answer 1

Well, obviously the difference between the CD and the DVD is that the DVD image, being larger, holds a lot more packages :-).

For the exact list, see the FAQ:

Which CD/DVD image contains package XYZ?

To find out which image contains a certain file, use the search facility for Debian .jigdo files, http://debian.org/CD/jigdo-cd/#search . Due to the way jigdo works, a .jigdo file contains a list of all the .deb packages and also of most other files on a CD/DVD. You can use the search script to locate the image you need.

If you just want a list of the files on a CD/DVD, look at the jigdo pages. There you can download all the .jigdo files used to create the images; they contain a list of the packages in the image. .jigdo files are simply compressed text files.