Fedora Core 2 Distribution Size
Stuart Children
stuart at terminus.co.uk
Mon Jan 5 13:52:52 UTC 2004
Maurice F. Piller wrote:
> Fedora Core 1 came out with 3 iso installation images. Has the size of the
> Fedora Core 2 release been determined yet?
[snip]
A few comments for the discussion:
- As has already been mentioned, enough people want different sets of
packages to make it impossible to place packages such that the majority
only needs 2 CDs.
- There is the issue with package ordering.
- Something that hasn't been mentioned: When fedora extras really gets
going we're going to have an even bigger problem when it comes to
upgrades. Imagine I'm upgrading from Fedora 2 to Fedora 3 and I have
many extras packages installed. I download the 2/3 CDs for Fedora
*Core*. I start an upgrade... anaconda finds some extras installed that
depend on an old version of a package in core which it is about to
upgrade. So it removes that extra package. If this happens for many
packages it's not good news! Perhaps someone can comment on how likely
this scenario is (one would hope that newer packages maintain backwards
compatibility, or compat packages are provided... but this is not always
the case).
- Obviously for an initial install you can just ignore extras and add
them later. But as soon as you add them you hit the upgrade problem
above. A solution is are mentioned below, but this does not really help
users without sufficient internet access speed or capacity. What do we
do for these users? Will we need to provide CDs of extras?
Some thoughts on solutions:
- Increased prominence of network based installs/upgrades. This has been
mentioned already. This means people don't need to download 2 CDs worth
of data to then only use 300Mb from each.
- Network installs can also pick up extras repositories (either
automatically or allow the user to specify - I would suggest the
former). This solves the upgrade problem above.
- Change how anaconda works (DANGER WILL ROBINSON ;]) so that there is a
base set of packages that gives you a barebones system (there has
already been discussion about this), and each CD is more like a
repository - ala Debian. Users on poor internet connections can get CDs
(off friends/whatever) that contain the majority of packages they use,
and use network means to fetch any odd ones from CDs they don't have. So
if I have lots of packages from CDs "FC1" and "FC2" and "FE1" (Fedora
Extras), but only 10 packages off "FC3" and "FE2" I can have the
benefits of CDs for most of what I need, but without having to get a
full set of them.
I am not proposing most of this for FC2 (certainly as it seems extras
will not be there). However, it is obviously going to need some thinking
about. There is a lot more to think about than the above - I only seek
to raise awareness that intrusive changes may need to be made, so the
sooner it's discussed the better.
If these issues have already been discussed and either dismissed or
solutions found, I would be interested to know what's planned!
Cheers
--
Stuart
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