Fedora 7 vs 6 installation

[Jerry Williams]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: fedora-devel-list-bounces at redhat.com [mailto:fedora-devel-list-
> bounces at redhat.com] On Behalf Of seth vidal
> Sent: Wednesday, January 10, 2007 9:45 PM
> To: Development discussions related to Fedora Core
> Subject: RE: Fedora 7 vs 6 installation
> 
> On Wed, 2007-01-10 at 21:19 -0700, Jerry Williams wrote:
> 
> > Yes, I have known about kickstart, any maybe I just need to learn more
> about
> > it and work with it some more.
> > But it seems like I do an install and then I add packages that I missed
> or
> > someone else does and I also remove packages.
> >
> > Like I add postfix and the switch mail program and then switch to
> postfix
> > and remove sendmail.  Haven't figure out how/if you can just install
> postfix
> > as your mail server with the GUI.
> >
> 
> %post in kickstart allows you to do pretty much whatever you want.
> 
> Our kickstarts are bare minimum then we add and configure all the
> packages for the system using yum + normal shell commands in %post
> 
> If you think kickstart isn't flexible enough to do what you want; then
> chances are good you're not thinking hard enough.
> 
> -sv

Thanks for the comment. 
I will probably try to use %post to accomplish what I need.

I wouldn't say that kickstart isn't flexible enough, but the GUI doesn't let
you pick individual packages or do a rpm -qa and populate a list of
packages.

And I really don't want to have to think hard.  I know that I could make it
work and would probably take the same route that you have and do a minimal
install and then use %post and just take the output from rpm -qa and put yum
install on the front of each package and it won't install anything that is
already installed and then I could compare a system with it and see what
packages I wanted removed and add rpm -e commands for those.

It kind or reminds me of using yum when a dependency is broken.  It would be
nice to have an option to just say update the things that are all there and
skip what you can't resolve.  Instead I have taken the list from yum and
made a wrapper script to give yum one package at a time to update and just
let the ones fail that are going to anyway.

Most SA's I know write programs so that they don't have to do tedious things
like you are talking about.  Kickstart has made some big improvements since
it was started and once you have the configuration file it is great.  But it
could still use some work on the GUI front end.  I would like an option next
to file or under file that says grab current running system configuration.
It's not like the code isn't out there.  When you do an install it goes and
looks at the LVM and disk partition information, why can't Kickstart?  It
could also do the dependency checking like yum does before it saves the
configuration file.  Or maybe it could just do that on the fly so that if
you checked that you wanted a package it would check the boxes for the
things that it depends on.

I seem to remember an older system that would let you check look at
everything and it would let you pick individual packages.  It would be nice
if Kickstart would let you expand each selection/group and see what was in
it and pick what you wanted and uncheck what you don't want.

Maybe Kickstart could be improved.
It seems to me that is what Fedora 7 is about, not running things you don't
need and starting up faster.  A better Kickstart GUI could go a long way to
making that happen.  Also if the install let you be more selective then you
could not install things you don't want/need and not have to wait for them
to start.

Or maybe like you said have the Fedora install be really simple minimum
packages and then have a nice program that lets you add/remove packages even
remotely and use current packages that don't need to be updated again.
Only problem I see is for the nice program you probably need at least X
Windows or KDE or Gnome.  If kickstart was better I probably would only do a
GUI install once and just use kickstart after that.