FC4 slimfast slimfest

[Rodd Clarkson]

On Tue, 2005-02-22 at 16:23 -0500, Jeff Spaleta wrote:
>On Tue, 22 Feb 2005 16:13:11 -0500, Daniel Veillard <veillard at redhat.com> wrote:
>>   From a distro user I also think clearly labelled ISO lead to less
>> confusion and also nobody should face
>>     "Installation will need CD1 CD2 CD3 CD4"
>>          "Okay"               "Reboot"
>
>Clearly labeled? what does that mean exactly?  The only way to be sure
>you have the cds you need.. is to know exactly what is on each cd...
>package by package.  You aren't going to break out things with easily
>digestable labels in such a way that makes sense to everyone.

I think better labeled disks is a great idea.  disc1, disc2, etc isn't
exactly helpful.  Having core1, core1, gnome, kde, games, devel, java,
etc would be much easier to understand.
>
>You have a KDE cd  and a game cd... which cd has the kde game you
>want?  Items can and will be intuitive members of multiple simple
>labels.

Sure, you're going to have some overlap, but in general this could be
solved without too much pain.  For example, gnome-games and kde-games
are, at the end of the day, games so put them on the games disk.  If the
user really wants them and expected them on the Gnome or KDE disk, then
all they have to do is yum install them, so no biggy (as far as I'm
concerned).  I'd much prefer to only have to download half the volume of
four disks (even if it still involved four disks) and then hvae to yum
install a couple of packages (using that tasty GUI yum tool that's
planned) than have to download a whole bunch of stuff I don't intend to
use just for the sake of 'simplicity'.

>You have a development tools cd  and a java cd... which one
>intuitively has the development tools for java? And god forbid we ever
>see a java based game.

Ah, but if you think about java like everything else, then you've really
got java and java-devel.

>The only way to be absolutely sure is to have a mechanism likr say a
>webpage.. people can go to before they download anything.. where they
>run through a mock install-time package selection session and that
>form spits out the isos they 'need'

What a great idea.  A simple but elegant way to solve this limited
confusion where you can go and select the packages you want to install
(in a very similar way to the current installer) and then it tells you
what disks you'll need and maybe even how much of the particular disk
you actually need.

Say for example, you select gnome, OOo and gnome-games.  The installer
*might* tell you that gnome-games is on the games disk but that it's the
only file you need from that disk and that you could just install it as
a  single case after the fact.  While this is a dream case, it could
tell you that you need 90% or core1, 85% or core2, 90% of gnome, 55% of
OOo (who needs all the languages) and 3% of games.  Because so little of
games is needed, it might break down the few packages needed and look at
dependancies (and offer alternative ways to install these few packages).


Rodd