Collapsing DVD and CD torrents into one

[Jeremy Katz]

On Sun, 2008-10-19 at 13:14 +0200, Till Maas wrote:
> On Sat October 18 2008, Jesse Keating wrote:
> > On Sat, 2008-10-18 at 01:04 +0200, Till Maas wrote:
> > > I have a probably crazy idea: How about composing the DVD iso using a
> > > filesystem that contains the CD isos and a bootloader that can use the CD
> > > isos as installation source? Then a little bit of space of the DVD iso
> > > would be wasted and it would take a little more effort to burn only the
> > > CD isos, but then only one torrent would be needed and everyone can
> > > easily share bandwidth with everyone else.
> >
> > Split media installs (which that would result in for even the DVD case)
> > has some interesting side-effects, that really hurt when trying to add
> > external repos (particularly of updates) at install time.  I wouldn't
> > want to force it upon everybody.
> 
> Would it be possible to not do a split media installation, but to configure 
> the kernel to allow more than 8 loop devices (if it is not already possible), 
> to loop mount all CD iso images and to configure each as a seperate repo for 
> anaconda, so that anaconda can access the contens of all iso images at once?

Each CD isn't its own separate repo.  Doing so would mean that we would
a) require you to put in each CD before letting you select your packages
and b) mean that the repos were pretty inconsistent internally.
Instead, each CD is a part of one repo and there's some knowledge
encoded in the metadata as to which disc each package is on.  

And while anything is possible, as I mentioned, doing something like
this (having the CD isos just loopback mounted off the DVD) would make
DVD vs CD installs substantially different in terms of how the code
works.  And that code is twisty turny enough as it is

Jeremy