without a truly working "jigdo", re-spins are effectively useless

[Kam Leo]

On Wed, Mar 11, 2009 at 9:13 AM, Alan Evans <ame.fedora at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 11, 2009 at 9:18 AM, Robert P. J. Day <rpjday at crashcourse.ca> wrote:
>>  sure, i'm willing to help out, but it (finally) dawned on me that
>> there's always going to be a fundamental drawback with the way jigdo
>> is being supported.  when the re-spin is created, it will of course be
>> current with the packages at all the mirrors.  however, once packages
>> are upgraded beyond that, the older packages will be dropped and the
>> (static) re-spin will no longer match what's at all the mirrors.  the
>> more time passes, the more packages will fail to match.  so what's the
>> solution?
>
> I, for one, am thankful for your rant. Before reading this thread, I
> had considered using jigdo because I thought it worked in some
> sensible way, like, "Make me a spin with these packages; get them from
> updates if they are there." Now that I know that the jigdo files are
> version-specific, I won't even give it a try. Thanks for saving me a
> ton of time!
>
> -Alan

Jigdo was created for the Debian community. The Debian Stable release
is known for its stability, i.e. slow change. Jigdo has its use in the
scheme of things. However, using it to stay current with a high churn
release such as Fedora is not one of them.

The ideal candidate for Jigdo is a slow changing distribution such as
CentOS, Debian, and Ubuntu LTS.  Even if you create a respin with a
package list that is a month old after an install there will be fewer
packages to update. This is especially beneficial when installing on
multiple machines or one that has a slow or limited access internet
connection.

By the way, when Fedora Unity Project first used Jigdo Fedora Core was
a relatively slow changing distribution.