Proposed F13 feature: drop separate updates repository

[Matthew Booth]

On 02/12/09 16:01, Justin M. Forbes wrote:
> On Wed, Dec 02, 2009 at 02:39:30PM +0000, Matthew Booth wrote:
>> The separate updates directory has been a pain for as long as I've been
>> using RHL/Fedora Core/Fedora. It means you have two places to look when
>> searching for packages manually, and twice as much to configure when you're
>> configuring yum. It has never benefitted me, or anybody I know, but it has
>> caught me out on any number of occasions. What's more, nobody really seems
>> to know why it's like that: it seems it's always been that way, and nobody
>> ever bother to fix it.
>>
> The only downside to merging updates into the main repository is that
> network installs from the repository will no longer install the "release"
> they will install the updated release.  QA that goes into that first
> impression is no longer there, and your installs are not repeatable because
> installing system A on one day and system B on another could end up with
> different versions of packages.  Of course you can always install from the
> ISOs to avoid these problems. As things are, you have the choice of the
> "release" as it was, or the updated release at install time.  I am not
> saying that this is a bad idea, in fact I rather like it, but there are
> things to consider.

That's not a bug, it's a feature! Seriously, wasn't it a specific F10 or 
F11 feature that anaconda allowed the user to specify that updates be 
installed at installation time? Certainly I used to have Debianites crow 
at me that my installation was vulnerable until I updated it. Not only 
that, but I had to download updated packages twice. These days I always 
install with updates. I find the installation argument dubious at best.

Still, we could rename the main repo the 'installation' repo, and 
nothing but anaconda would ever look at it. Everything else would look 
at the main repo, which would be the same as the current updates repo 
except with everything in it from the start.

Matt
-- 
Matthew Booth, RHCA, RHCSS
Red Hat Engineering, Virtualisation Team

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