Reduce "Core" to 1 Binary CD? -- WAS: Request for Packages in Fedora Core 3

[Jeff Spaleta]

On Mon, 24 May 2004 14:38:14 +0100, Dave Jones <davej at redhat.com> wrote:
> With extras in place, we can migrate many of/all the non-essential apps
> there.  Another area that may need improvements would be package
> installation.  Whilst up2date / yum / system-config-packages are
> improving over time, people (including myself) still have various gripes
> over what these packages do (or don't do) in various situations.
<rant>
One situation that comes up repeatedly in #fedora
you do a desktop install which installs foo-1.1 package
you get the online update for foo-1.2
you using system-config-packages to install foo-server-1.1 from
cd...but it won't
install becuase there is a dependancy foo-1.1 and you have foo-1.2 installed.
since system-config-packages is not network aware yer screwed...you have to use
up2date or yum via the commandline to do the foo-server install from
the network.
</rant>


> 
> I'd really like to see us get to the stage where an install just
> installs a bare-bones system[1], and after booting, firstboot runs
> system-config-packages to pull in anything else we desire.
> Moving the bulk of the package selection out of the installer.
> I think I recall Jeremy being quite enthusiastic about this too
> at various points in time, so who knows.. it could happen 8)

This makes sense for fresh installs....but anaconda managed
upgrades...man oh man thats going to suck a lot. Multi-staged installs
make sense...but anaconda based upgrades...not so obvious that its
going to be able to do it in a way where you are risking some rather
nasty rpmdb inconsistancies. And having to require network
connectivity to do upgrades to get around this issue, well thats not
so cool in some situations.

-jef