Do we need split media CDs for F12?

[Jeroen van Meeuwen]

On Tue, 16 Jun 2009 17:17:59 -0700, Jesse Keating <jkeating at redhat.com>
wrote:
> On Wed, 2009-06-17 at 01:43 +0200, Jeroen van Meeuwen wrote:
>> If by better alternatives you mean LiveCDs, please note that these do
not
>> allow one to upgrade the existing Fedora installation, nor do they allow
>> as
>> much flexibility in configuration during the installation procedure.
> 
> Any upgrade process that doesn't take into account the released updates
> and/or any third party repos that have been added is just a failure.

For as far as Fedora is concerned (not third party repositories) at least
it seems obvious that our update process is somewhat flawed in this aspect,
breaking the upgrade path. I think it should be looked at but I won't
bother sinking my teeth into it as it is a Release Engineering kinda job.

  We
> often see situations where key things like yum stop working because the
> user updated too far in F10 before upgrading using the static F11 media,
> and having yum from F10 be newer than yum from the static F11 CDs and
> them boom.  Same things happens with other packages too.  Our
> development process, for better or worse, leaves users with a very
> difficult time upgrading unless they do online upgrades.
> 
> As for flexibility, netinstall with a local repo fed by the DVD seems
> reasonable there for people that need that extra flexibility.
> 

And I think there's many, many more potential combinations of foo and bar
and baz that build tricks that perform just as well as ... a simple CD set.

These scenarios just sound weird to me;

User: "I only have a CD-ROM, what do I do?"

Fedora: "You download netinst.iso and the DVD"

User: "And what do I do with those?"

Fedora: "You put the DVD on a hd/usb stick, stick the hd/stick into the
computer, boot from the netinst.iso, provide "linux askmethod" on the
kernel cmdline of isolinux, choose "Hard Disk" as the installation source,
pick the correct drive, and continue the installation. Note that you might
need an extra hd especially if you're going to re-partition the entire
drive that is currently in the computer, or a computer that is capable of
booting off USB. Also, be careful you do not remove all partitions because
some partition contains your installation source. You figure out which sdX
is the installation source."

Or:

User: "I only have a CD-ROM, what do I do?"

Fedora: "Buy a DVD-ROM, they're cheap, then come back. When come back,
bring pie."

Or:

User: "I only have a CD-ROM, what do I do?"

Fedora: "We know you wanted to install a different set of packages, but
here's a LiveCD that you can then tweak after the installation, to get the
packages you originally wanted. Ohw, and please mind you cannot 1) use a
kickstart file to automate the installation or 2) upgrade the current
Fedora installation. You might also not be able to customize the
installation to it's full extent."

Or:

User: "I only have a CD-ROM, what do I do?"

Fedora: "You take one machine and 'yum install cobbler'. Configure it. Then
you take the DVD and import it into cobbler. Boot the system you wanted to
install in the first place and pray it is capable of booting off the
network."

Kind regards,

Jeroen van Meeuwen
-kanarip