Where is my "everything" gone?

[Paul W. Frields]

On Wed, 2006-04-12 at 20:04 +0200, Olivier Galibert wrote:
> At this point, installing is a lottery as to whether the applications
> you need will be there, because no sane human has the attention span
> to check every little submenu.  Install everything was a way to win
> this lottery by throwing money, i.e. hard drive space, at it.  You can
> always remove things afterwards, you don't need a media or a network
> connection for that.  Or, with current hard drive sizes, just leave it
> that way and just don't start or configure what you don't need at a
> particular point in time.

It seems to me that installing everything was mostly used as a way to
avoid what folks used to call "RPM dependency hell" (although frankly,
if you knew how to use RPM macros and a mirror, that was less a problem
than it was made out to be).  Now that we have yum, this is not a
problem.  You don't have to play the lottery at all; you can actually
select what the user really wants.  If the software which the users are
asking for "every other day" is somewhat predictable, you don't even
have to use "*" as your glob for package installation.

> > We give kickstart the ability to use globs.  Problem solved.
> 
> So the only way to do real package selection or ensure that you won't
> have to move around with a bag of cds is to drop anaconda and use
> kickstart instead.  Interesting.

It's not a "drop this/use that instead" proposition.  Kickstart is a
method of anaconda, which allows you to do things in an automated
fashion.  I'm confused; I thought you knew about kickstart already.  The
only sane way to handle package selection IMHO is to class your
systems/users in some logical fashion and do kickstart installations.
If that class is to install "*", so be it.  As someone who kept up with
several classrooms full of workstations and servers, and a laboratory
full of individual users, I don't see how you would want to do
installations any other way.

> > Gets even more fun when Extras is involved, or other repos.  Then is it
> > everything in the repo, everything in these repos, everything in these
> > repos minus languages, so on and so forth.
> 
> Stop thinking blindly about "everything", and think about it in terms
> of "select all, user can deselect parts afterwards".

Again, people have proffered the obvious, easy, well-supported, sane,
and low-maintenance solution in kickstart.  Sitting down at every (or
*any*) station and clicking your way through an installation when you
don't have to is just wasting valuable time.

This is not to say that the multi-select button is wasteful either.  But
if you're looking to save time on administering "200+" systems, check
out kickstart, like, yesterday.  Cheers.

-- 
Paul W. Frields, RHCE                          http://paul.frields.org/
  gpg fingerprint: 3DA6 A0AC 6D58 FEC4 0233  5906 ACDB C937 BD11 3717
 Fedora Documentation Project: http://fedora.redhat.com/projects/docs/
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