Shrinking/splitting up core Was: Why are there only i686 and i586 Version of glibc...

[Steven Pritchard]

On Sun, Jun 06, 2004 at 03:23:41PM -0400, Willem Riede wrote:
> How would that work with respect to upgrades? Haven't we had cases where glibc
> needed to be upgraded and that change affected virtually all applications?
> With a monolithic distribution that is pretty painless, compatible versions
> are available and replace their ancestors.

This really comes back to a question that came up a week or so ago...
How should anaconda handle third-party installation CDs?  (If the
method is good enough for Fedora Extras, it should be good enough for
any third-party repository.)

Personally, I'm starting to wonder if a two-stage install wouldn't
make the most sense...  The installer comes up to a screen that says
something like this:

  Please check the installation CDs you have available.

  [X] Fedora Core 3 (CD #1)
  [ ] Fedora Core 3 (CD #2)
  [ ] Fedora Core 3 (CD #3)
  [ ] Fedora Core 3 (CD #4)
  
  +----------------------------------+
  | Scan other installation media... |
  +----------------------------------+

Then the package selection could be limited to whatever CDs are
actually available.  (Sure, you'd have to cycle through your other
media, once to scan for packages, and a second time to actually
install, but that seems like a small price to pay for the
flexibility...)

The only thing that complicates this is kickstart installs, and I
would think that could be solved by adding a kickstart option for
pointing it at additional media.

  comps "Fedora Extras (CD #1)" http://download.fedora.us/fedora/fedora/latest/$ARCH/base/cd1.xml
  comps "Local Stuff" hd:fd0:/local.xml

(Something like that.)

Then the installer could just pop up something saying "Insert CD
'Local Stuff'" or whatever when it hits the point where it needs a
package from that CD...

It seems like the hardest trick would be to convince the installer to
do all the ordering so you didn't need to swap CDs repeatedly.

Side note...  I have to wonder how hard it would be to convince apt to
do a lot of the heavy lifting here...

  http://platform.progeny.com/anaconda/

Steve
-- 
Steven Pritchard - K&S Pritchard Enterprises, Inc.
Email: steve at kspei.com             http://www.kspei.com/
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