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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