Where has the F10 DVD iso file gone?

[Christopher A. Williams]

On Wed, 2008-12-31 at 10:26 -0500, Chuck Anderson wrote:
> On Wed, Dec 31, 2008 at 06:16:27AM -0700, Christopher A. Williams wrote:
> > But again, if we are to go this far, why not go the extra step and make
> > monthly updated ISOs available instead?
> 
> It is really a lot more difficult than you might think.  Doing this 
> "in-house" would put a stress on the already overworked releng team.  
> The mirrors would need more space to store these extra ISOs.  
> Bandwidth would be needed for mirroring and end-user downloads.  
> Efforts would need to be spent doing QA on these respins.  All of 
> these tasks would detract developers and testers from working on the 
> next Fedora release and maintaining the current ones.

It's not more difficult than I think. I know it's hard, but then again
if this were easy to do, I submit a lot of us would already have done it
by now.

I really would like to see more of us using our expertise to come up
with options of how we could overcome these kinds of issues with
realistic, workable solutions instead of using our collective knowledge
and skills to come up with excuses for why it couldn't be done. I demand
no less than this from the teams I lead. See my e-mail signature for
part of my philosophy in this.

> Not to mention--there already is a project to do respins, Fedora 
> Unity.  Ask them how much work it has been.  If you want to improve 
> their distribution method, then help them out instead of complaining 
> that Fedora should do the work instead.  Perhaps you could start your 
> own mirror with ISO downloads of Fedora Unity respins.

I know all about, have been somewhat active with Fedora Unity, and
appreciate their very hard work to date. I also do try to participate
regularly as I am able, so perhaps it would be better if you stopped
making assumptions about my so-called complaints...

Now - in the time it took for you to respond, I decided one again to go
about the process of using Revisor to try and create my own updated,
custom spin for myself. My experience underscores the points I was
making before.

Revisor:

1) Failed to use the kickstart file I created despite that I specified
one I had created using system-config-kickstart

2) Failed to connect to the repositories correctly at first - because it
was looking by default for the F10 Updates-Newkey repository, which
doesn't exist.

3) Although it allowed me to say I wanted to build a custom 64-bit spin,
it got itself confused in package selection between 32-bit and 64-bit
packages. There was no way to exclude the unwanted 32-bit packages. This
resulted in...

...A set of conflicts where, after downloading and caching over 2GB of
RPMs, dependency conflicts between 32-and 64-bit packages caused the
entire process to fail.

Thus, as I mentioned in a previous post, I wound up once again with a
stack of error messages and a huge cache of RPMs (almost half of which I
didn't need for the task) on my hard drive for 90 minutes worth of work.

Shall I try to repeat the process with jigdo to make the others
happy...?

My bottom line point is this: There is an established need for regularly
updated ISOs. Fedora Unity, for example, would likely not exist at all
if this need didn't exist. It doesn't matter that this is hard to do -
it's still necessary. If the QA process is such that it's hard to get
this through, then we need to not only fix the tools used to do spins /
respins, we also need to fix and optimize (as necessary) the QA process
which is involved in the effort. We should be finding ways to work
smarter - not harder.

I'm a big believer in that a high quality set of efficient process and
tools generally leads to quality products that are efficiently built and
distributed. I also believe that the existing tools (both Revisor and
Jigdo) are actually pretty close to being able to support the need. The
problems I have found with them smack more of the kind of mistakes made
because people are stressed, overworked, or just plain "brain farted"
and forgot something really simple along the way. There are
well-established things that could be done to address these issues.

As they own the distribution, the Fedora team absolutely needs to take
ownership of fixing the overall issue. No excuses. That would allow
groups like Fedora Unity to do what they do more easily. I'm willing to
be a part of that process on an as available basis, but like others I
still have my day job I need to do to feed my family. My wife has also
made it perfectly clear that I need to continue being "Dad" to our kids
and a husband to her (which is a good thing, by the way).

Cheers,

Chris


--
====================================
"Ninety-nine percent of the failures
come from people who have the habit
of making excuses."

--George Washington Carver