Feature proposal: Rebootless Installer

Jesse Keating jkeating at redhat.com
Tue Jul 14 16:40:19 UTC 2009


On Tue, 2009-07-14 at 11:19 -0400, Colin Walters wrote:
> There's no such step in the live install (right?).    Now, it would
> likely make sense to have such a mechanism, but it would need design.
> I forget offhand too how the PackageKit updater works in the live
> image (do we disable it by default?).

With the Anaconda live installer, it's the raw unmodified live
filesystem that is "copied" to the newly partitioned disk(s).  Ergo any
rpm updating you do on the LiveOS before you start the installer will be
lost.

It appears that Doglas' installer uses the in use LiveOS so that the
changes you make while running the LiveOS before starting the install
will be carried over into the install.

That in itself seems interesting enough to explore and see if we can't
get the same functionality, to some extent into Anaconda.

As for rebootless, that's interesting too.  I'm glad you were able to
demo the technology within your installer, but I'd worry about the
duplication of effort/code to have yet another program that is designed
to discover disks, partition them appropriately for an install, copy
content, then install a boot loader.  There is a lot of logic code in
Anaconda to get the partitioning correct for an installation, even if
the backend code uses system level libraries and tools to accomplish the
partitioning.  Ditto boot loaders and kernel setup.  If we as a project
find rebootless installation useful then we should find a way to
integrate it with our existing installer and code set which already
carries all the logic necessary to pull it off, from years of experience
and bug reports.

I think your work is great and useful though!

-- 
Jesse Keating
Fedora -- Freedom² is a feature!
identi.ca: http://identi.ca/jkeating
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 197 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
URL: <http://listman.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/attachments/20090714/5efa32a2/attachment.sig>


More information about the fedora-devel-list mailing list