Re: FC4 slimfast slimfest

[Alexandre Oliva <aoliva redhat com>]

On Feb 22, 2005, Chris Adams <cmadams hiwaay net> wrote:

> That still assumes everyone has high-speed bandwidth available, which is
> a broken assumption.  If you think everyone should be downloading to get
> most packages, why not make boot.iso the only distributed image and make
> everything else downloaded?  That "solves" all the CD/DVD count and
> distribution issues.

> I am disappointed that the setup for Fedora Extras is to just have a
> rolling-update tree with no ISOs.  That makes FE packages second class
> citizens.

How about rolling out ISOs of Fedora Extras *and* Core weekly or so,
including all updates?  This would address the issue of people who
install FC3 now and then have to download an additional 1.5 CD just to
get all of the available updates, then have them all installed
overnight.

If we keep the distribution of packages inside ISOs relatively stable,
rsync (which all? mirrors use to get contents from the master server)
would do a great job limiting the transferred data to the new
packages, and perhaps even less than that, since rsync could then take
advantage of similarities between the old version of the package and
the new build.

If we had tools to look into ISOs built into yum, then mirrors could
even refrain from carrying the exploded trees.  Just like yum 2.1 uses
byte ranges to download the header portion of an rpm, it could extract
rpms from isos.  Failing that, there's always loopback mount or
isoinfo.

-- 
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}