select individual packages during install.

[Brian Jones]

Hi all.

I've heard (and experienced) that the ability to select individual 
packages during installation has been removed from Fedora Core 1. Before 
you go crazy, I'm NOT talking about hitting the 'details' button for 
each group and selecting from the packages listed. Even if you pick 
*all* of these packages, it doesn't amount to *all* of the available 
packages that come with the distribution. The only way to do that is to 
choose an 'everything' install, which even warns you that your install 
will be considerably larger than just selecting all of the packages 
listed in the 'details' for each group.

As an administrator, I have to install many Linux boxes. Historically, I 
have used kickstart for this, and the easiest way to create a kickstart 
template is to go through *one* really long, arduous install, and then 
use the resulting .ks file in root's home directory as a starting point. 
Generally, the problem with creating a good kickstart file in my 
environment isn't really adding packages, per se (though I do some of 
that), but *removing* packages I don't want, that are part of the 
default installation. Not having this feature at install time in FC1 
means that my .ks file upon first boot is absolutely useless to me. It 
still baffles my mind why the team would go out of its way to *remove* 
this functionality - though admittedly, I don't spend a lot of time 
trolling the dev list. I've seen references online to the fact that this 
subject has been covered a million times - but I don't see actual links. 
If anyone has links that explain the reasoning, let me in on that!

Regardless - links or no links - what I'm left with now is a situation 
where I have about 30 machines to install, and I'm now going to use 
'ghost' to install them. The biggest value add to using redhat over 
other distributions in the past was the ability to kickstart machines. 
If I'm just going to ghost them anyway, that value add is gone 
completely, so I might just as well use gentoo ;-)

My real question is simply 'is this feature coming back, and if so, when?'.

thanks