Making Fedora Core CD #1 Standalone -- Core should continue, but let's define a subset

Chris Chabot chabotc at 4-ice.com
Tue May 25 14:37:48 UTC 2004


Bryan J. Smith wrote:

>Now many have suggested, heck I even started out by taking Pritchard's
>post, about "rolling back" the size of Fedora Core.  Talk of moving
>things to Extras, or elsewhere.  But by the very nature of Core v.
>Extras, there may be legacy/compatibility issues to consider.
>  
>
This is indeed a big can of worms. To further complicate the matter, you 
always need to keep the upgrade path in mind to. If someone is running 
redhat 8,9, fedora core 1 or 2, they should be able to download the 
install cd's and upgrade their existing system.. This means a whole lot 
of packages _have_ to be included to provide compat-XYZ or newer 
versions of the already installed packages. This kind of means that 90% 
of the existing packages are automaticly tied in on the install cd's.

So with that in mind, what profit can still be gained by re-ordering 
packages around on cd's, and making minimal install cd's?

IMHO you could make the first cd a "Basic but relatively complete" 
install cd, which includes all basic apps, web browsers, basic services 
and server apps, yum, system-config-packages, etc; Which you could use 
to install a new functional and working Workstation, or Server installation.

The other (3) cd's would include all the other packages that are 
currently in fedora core 2, and should be listed and described in the 
comps / rpmdb-fedora packages.

Then if you do a clean install it would only use the first CD to do the 
basic install, run thru first-boot, and allow people to add additional 
packages from either the 3 extra's cd's (it would know where they are 
and ask for the correct cd by looking that up in the comps / 
rpmdb-fedora lists), or offer the option to download them from a 
selected mirror.

However if you do an upgrade using the first cd, it can use the 
knowledge of what packages are on what cd's to include those in the 
upgrade, and do a clean and sound upgrade (asking for those cd's as it 
does now).


As far as i can think off thats the only way to satisfy the upgrade 
cycle dependency, while allowing for a 1 core cd install.

Ofcource then the question becomes "What packages do we include on the 
core cd". To be able to play around with that question i've written a 
little tool in PHP which i've posted in a seperate email (Subject: A 
usefull tool (Was: Making Fedora Core CD #1 Standalone)).

You would be supprised at how much you can still include on the first 
CD.. With that tool you can show that all this paranoia about "Don't 
include any, *0* apps on the core CD" is being overly zealous..

Your able to fit quite a large collection of workstation and server 
packages on one CD.. The mix that i came up with playing with the 
dep-tree tool is:

./dep-tree.php -d firstboot system-config-packages mozilla yum rpm mdadm 
cups vixie-cron httpd samba jfsutils php perl usbutils isdn4k-utils 
irda-utils metacity gnome-desktop gnome-session gnome-panel compat-db 
compat-libstdc++ compat-glibc openssh openssh-server openssh-clients 
openldap samba screen magicdev openmotif xmms gedit lm_sensors ntp 
gnome-utils autofs setserial nmap mgetty stunnel curl eject 
nautilus-cd-burner nautilus-media lsof wget telnet ftp gnome-applets 
gftp openoffice.org gimp gaim links mkinitrd mktemp ttmkfdir mkbootdisk 
xpdf eog gcc autoconf automake15 autoconf213 automake automake14 make
Number of packages: 457
Total size installed: 1557 Mb
Total packaged size:  498 Mb

So this includes (i think) all the basic packages for a working linux 
instalation, qt/gnome/kde/motif compatiblity, mozilla, gimp, gaim, 
openoffice and lots of other workstation apps, and all required basic 
server apps (webserver, openssh, telnet, ftp, yum, nmap, screen, wget, 
links etc)

The nice thing of this is that the first CD can then offer 4 install modes:
- Basic Workstation
- Basic Server
- Both server and workstation software
- Minimal instalation (90 or so megs, already included in FC1/2)
[x] checkbox Include development packages and tools

While still offering a fully functional end result, and including all 
*-devel packages and compilers so the system is self-building and allows 
you to compile kernels, source rpm's or tarbals (imho it would go 
against the spirit of *nix / open source to have a system that could not 
compile software or it's self)

Then if they want all KDE apps, more server software, a slow of perl-* 
packages, databases, then the extra 3 cd's come into play (and/or 
external repositories)





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