Fedora 7 (Everything installs)

[David Cantrell]

Dax Kelson wrote:
> On Fri, 2007-01-05 at 17:27 -0500, Paul W. Frields wrote:
>>  I don't think merging the repos makes any of
>> the existing reasons for doing away with this selection any less sound.
> 
> Of course it does. The major argument bandied about for the removal of
> 'Everything' was the creation of extras.

It was more about anaconda supporting installations from any number of 
yum repositories.

As stated many many many times in the past, Everything cannot be defined 
when we allow people to install from an arbitrary number of repositories.

And if we did install everything we found (and assuming the backend 
didn't crash when resolving dependencies), people would complain that 
the install took too long.

> It is useful for a variety of situations. Many, many, people have asked
> for it back. Now that the merge is happening, let's *restore* the
> feature that existed for years.

Of all of the complaints that have come in just in the past year 
regarding the removal of the Everything install, only *one* was 
reasonable, IMHO.  And solving that was a matter of educating the user 
on how to set up kickstart to provision systems (and we still support 
Everything installs via kickstart using '*' under %packages).  In their 
case, systems were provisioned and then carried in to a secure DoD 
research environment without any Internet connectivity.  They wanted to 
set up the systems with everything installed up front and not have to 
install later since they _couldn't_ do that.

My solution was to set up kickstart to do a normal install, mirror all 
the packages to the /var/cache/yum tree and then let them use yum later 
on if they need to install things.  It worked well.

-- 
David Cantrell
Red Hat / Westford, MA