I want more CDs in the distribution

[Alexandre Oliva]

On Feb 28, 2005, Jamie Zawinski <jwz at jwz.org> wrote:

> What I generally do is install the absolutely minimal fedora I can, and
> then install the rest after the machine has booted.  This is good
> because it gets me past the part I might actually have to fuck around
> with (partitioning, debugging boot loader problems) right away, and then
> most importantly, *gets me a network* while things are installing, so
> I'm not sitting there bored out of my mind while it grinds away:
> Anaconda doesn't let me ssh out to check my mail.

Erhm...

Ctrl-Alt-F2


> Also it means I don't end up installing 80% of the packages twice (the
> version on the CD, and then the upgrade from yum.)

This is actually a very good point.

We could argue towards shipping updated CDs as well, and get the
installer to use them.  Like rolling releases.  I suggested that
before, and Seth says it might not even be too hard to get yum to peek
into the ISOs to get the rpms, but it would take some eeky work.

As for post-install installation, I've been thinking of rpm's new (?)
feature Requires(missingok): (did it actually make to the latest rpm
release?): it could be used to represent package groups, such that,
instead of having package collections the way they are now, mostly
static, we could instead have meta-packages that determined the
standard composition of a package group, but still in such a way that
you could remove some of the components afterwards without leaving
your system with artificially-broken deps.

> I know that the installer currently does that two-stage thing where
> firstboot (or whatever) asks you to install additional packages after
> the machine is on the net with a desktop.  I'd like to see stage 1 get a
> lot smaller, and almost everything go into stage 2.

If you could do all that with kickstart as well, I'm sold.  Rolling
the same set of packages onto dozens of boxes isn't exactly pleasant
otherwise.  It sure would be a plus if the first-stage install didn't
actually take longer, but rather it just passed info on to firstboot
(which currently doesn't run in kickstart installs) such that it can
complete the install without interaction, while the box might already
be (somewhat) usable.  Whether the installation of additional packages
should be done in background or not, with or without a round of
package updates and reboot afterwards, would be configured in
kickstart.

-- 
Alexandre Oliva             http://www.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva/
Red Hat Compiler Engineer   aoliva@{redhat.com, gcc.gnu.org}
Free Software Evangelist  oliva@{lsd.ic.unicamp.br, gnu.org}