FC4 slimfast slimfest

[Reuben Farrelly]

Hi,

Tyler Larson wrote:
> Havoc Pennington wrote:
> 
>>  [...]
>>  2) maybe we are willing to consider removing anything,
>>     if so I propose this approach:
>>     - create "profiles" of complete sets of packages that some
>>    common audiences would want; avoid duplicate-functionality/
>>    indecision as much as possible in those
>>
>>  - try to include/exclude complete profiles
>>
>>  for example, a complete "corporate desktop",
>>  "mail server", "print server", "file server", "sysadmin
>>  workstation", "C programming environment",  "java programming 
>> environment", etc.
>>
>>  dump entire use cases like that; and dump multiple ways  to do a 
>> single use case.
>>
>>  Rationale: it's stupid to include half of a use case, since
>>  you are already causing that person to go to Extras, you
>>  may as well send them there for everything.
>>
>> Havoc
>>
> 
> 
> Brilliant idea. Solves all our problems, but creates a set of new one.
> 
> Like, for example, what will the ISOs look like?

Well, the most obvious way is to just use the 'profiles' guidelines 
which are currently used for the installation - I imagine Havoc had this 
in mind with his suggestion.  The distribution is clearly already 
partially divided up in the sense that when installing, one is asked to 
choose between package groups like 'network server', 'workstation' etc 
preselected with roughly the right RPM's.

Seems to me that the logical way this should be split is:

* 1 core/common CD which contains things like glibc, kernel, initscripts 
and basic system stuff that everyone requires, enough to get a machine 
up to runlevel 3 awaiting a login, with some basic stuff such as network 
connectivity, python ready to go etc  If someone had loads of bandwidth 
from that point on they could even pull down whatever they wanted over 
the network and install it.

* 1 desktop CD that has KDE/Gnome + + OpenOffice + X stuff eg games 
(enough for the casual or home user to do what they want).  For those 
who love their spell checker, that can go here too ;)

* 1 server CD which contains servers and development applications 
(probably where more packages of interest in RHEL live)

The future possibility of a packager shipping their own CD as #4 with 
their own custom apps then looks quite easy, literally a 'bolt on' CD 
that follows on from the core/common #1 CD.

The flexibility is there at this stage such that what won't fit on each 
CD should be pushed to extras online, and on the other hand, if there is 
spare space, possibly content from extras online could be pre-loaded 
into an 'extras' directory on the CD to fill it up.

Given the number of mails from this list today, I think that the 
suggestion of trimming packages to make space was very definitely done 
on Monday morning at the start of the week ;)  I imagine there was some 
faint hope of a consensus of sorts being reached by Friday...............

reuben