Announcing Fedora Core 6 Test 2 (5.91)

[Jeremy Katz]

On Mon, 2006-08-07 at 09:48 -0500, Dennis Gilmore wrote:
> On Monday 07 August 2006 09:30, Jeremy Katz wrote:
> > On Mon, 2006-08-07 at 10:05 -0400, Jay Lee wrote:
> > > Jesse Keating wrote:
> > > > * Ability to install from additional yum repositories during anaconda
> > > > installations and kickstarts.
> > >
> > > Does this mean I'll be able to simply point Anaconda to an updates
> > > repository and immediately install the very latest updates without ever
> > > having installed the old rpms?
> >
> > Yep -- although for FC6 final, it'll require knowing and inputting the
> > repository info manually[1].  In the future, I want to look into ways of
> > pulling this sort of information and having a pre-populated list of
> > things such as updates and extras to be able to just select.
> 
> as a thought how hard would it be to make It work for say a extras DVD?  say  
> just before fc6 release  we snapshot extras, run createrepo on it and make a 
> dvd iso,  or even cd isos  can we do that?  I guess for cds  you would have 
> to do something similar to debian  and insert each cd/dvd at the start so 
> that the repo metadata  can be read.  but then the install would offer all 
> those packages.  dvd would be simpler  you dont need to worry about 
> dependency order so much

Unfortunately, ISO media is a whole lot harder[1].  It's not really
possible to ask questions in text mode like this as you want to be able
to ask in the user's native language.  But a lot of languages that we
now support can't be shown in text mode.  But the second stage runs off
of the CD making it difficult to eject it :-)

Longer term, the way to handle this is probably changing the way the
installer works somewhat so that we commit partitioning changes to disk
after you do that stage rather than waiting until the end.  This has
some downsides in that if something _fails_, your partitioning changes
have already happened.  But it also has a positive impact for trying to
do partition resizing.  

> but right now  im thinking it would be nice to make an extras iso.  everyso 
> often  i have to do an install in a location that has crappy internet 
> connection.  and  it would be much simpler to do from a local media.  some  
> parts of the world  it will really help

It should at least be possible to do this for use post-install now for
DVDs (or a CD as long as it all fits on a single CD).  Writing up the
instructions on how to nicely do that is on my whiteboard of "stuff to
do"[2]

Jeremy

[1] CD doesn't actually add any difficulty to the anaconda side -- it's
a little bit harder to generate the ISOs, but after that, it's all the
same.
[2] The quick rundown if anyone wants to play and beat me to writing it
up is a) put the stuff in the disc b) run createrepo c) have an autorun
that looks something like
   dir=$(echo $0 | sed 's/autorun//')
   cd $dir
   tree=$(pwd)
   cd /
   exec /usr/bin/system-cd-installhelper --repo=$tree