Making Fedora Core CD #1 Standalone -- WAS: Reduce "Core" to 1 Binary CD?

[Bryan J. Smith]

[ Yes, I'm renaming the subject yet again ;-]

Alexandre Oliva wrote:  
> As in, make the installer one of the applications of a Fedora Core
> Live CD?  First thing it does is to copy the contents of its root
> filesystem to the chosen root filesystem (should be faster than
> `rpm'ing around lots and lots of packages, and saves CD space!), then
> enables the user to select additional packages to install/remove.

Oh, no.  I don't think I was saying that at all.  Doing a "Live!" CD
would only bloat the sucker, while adding additional engineering
effort.

What I'm proposing is just:  
  1.  A careful re-evaluation of the "essential" components
  2.  These components go on Fedora Core CD #1,
       which can _now_ be standalone (you only need CD #1)

That's _all_ I'm suggesting.  All it takes is some careful decision
making regarding packages, but *0* re-engineering effort.  At most,
there would just need to be some checking that _nothing_ on CD #1
has any dependencies on any other "Core" CDs.

Maybe I only confused people by calling it "Quark" or "miniCore."
In a nutshell, I'm just talking about making Fedora Core CD #1
standalone -- that's all!

But if careful planning is required, then we _might_ need to add
a 6th repository guideline (I call it "Quark" by call it whatever):

                   Dependency Limitations
  Quark:    Quark
    Core:  Quark, Core
 Extras:   Quark, Core, Extras
    ... etc ...

We'll still have "Core" for Legacy Red Hat Linux (RHL) and all its
dependencies.  But sooner or later (hopefully sooner), it would be
nice to define a "smaller Core" -- one that amounts to less than
500MB compressed would be ideal (fits on a single CD).  Let us
aim for just basic client functionality using X+GNOME (and minimal
at that!).

I call this Fedora "Quark" for repository/dependency arguments
sake (call it what you will in the finale).

Fedora "Core" should continue to be developed, as-is, as the RHL
replacement.  Quark will be a part of Core.  But Quark will offer a
"reduced package list" that has self-only dependency, just like
Core is to Core, Extra to Extras, etc...

[ BTW, someone could certainly make a "Live" version of Fedora Core
CD #1, but I'm not suggesting the Fedora team head that up.  There
are plenty of people who could do this after-the-fact.  In fact,
something like "Quark" should be defined in the first place _before_
someone comes up with a "Live" CD.  But a Live CD is something else
entirely. ]

Chris Chabot wrote:  
> Actually rpm packages compress the binary payload (gzip default,
> configurable for bzip2), so uncompressed on cd storage would require
> more space. Secondly cd read speed is slower (presumably) then your
> HD write speed, so extracting & writing files should be faster then
> copying them straight from cd.

Just to re-iterate, I was not talking about a Live CD.  That's not
related to my recomendation for a "subset" of Core that weighs
in at less than 500MB, has 0 dependencies on anything else, and would
ideally be CD #1 in Fedora Core itself.



-- 
Bryan J. Smith, E.I. -- b.j.smith at ieee.org