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

Alexandre Oliva aoliva at redhat.com
Mon May 24 17:09:00 UTC 2004


On May 24, 2004, Dave Jones <davej at redhat.com> wrote:

> 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.

This is not such a good idea for a machine that needs all of the
extras installed before it boots up and start running say sendmail,
because people want to use these add-ons for their mail delivery.
sendmail is just an example; any other daemons that are started and
can be configured with kickstart rules to do the right thing suddenly
get trickier if the core is missing the packages and kickstart won't
let you do non-interactive up2date installs because it wants up2date
configuration to be confirmed.

After a kickstart install, I'd like to machine to be as ready for use
as possible.  Deferring installation of most of the distro to
post-installation time sounds like an oxymoron to me.

Now if only firstboot would run before the installer reboots, or
before any services are started, you might have a case, but having
firstboot run after a server comes up and starts pretending to serve
stuff correctly is a Very Bad Idea (TM).

I understand the wish to move stuff out of the installer.  Having the
installer run additional programs at the end, instead of after a
reboot, would help take code out of the installer, and might be seen
as a good thing for many.

However, one of the good things about anaconda is that it asks all
questions first, and then proceeds to install without any need for
additional interaction, except for the click for reboot at the end.
Adding a necessary firstboot step to select and install additional
packages would add a second major interaction before the install can
be said to be finished, followed by a potentially long delay as
additional packages are downloaded and installed.  And then, probably
yet another reboot just to make sure things are all set and in place.
This sounds *very* undesirable to me.

-- 
Alexandre Oliva             http://www.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva/
Red Hat Compiler Engineer   aoliva@{redhat.com, gcc.gnu.org}
Free Software Evangelist  oliva@{lsd.ic.unicamp.br, gnu.org}





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