Suggestion for a new Download page

[Jonas Pasche]

Hi Raphael,

> The motivation is to have a page a non-expert can go to and by reading
> it and following the links be able to get yum or apt working on their
> system.

Exactly that's covered by "Using Fedora Legacy with yum on Red Hat 7.x",
but...

> If there is another page that does the same thing then that is great
> but I haven't seen it.  

...obviously it isn't obvious enough that this is page you look for.
What about renaming it to "Getting started with using Fedora Legacy", or
a red-blinking ;-) note saying "Start here"? ;-)

> The Documentation page currently has three links and almost nothing else on it.

What else did you expect? The first link tells you exactly what you
summarized in your last posting: Getting yum, installing yum, importing
the Fedora Legacy GPG key, updating your system, staying up to date
automatically.

> This page is clearly only of use to people who want to do one of those 
> three things and know what yum and apt are for.

Which I read as a strong advise to give these documents better titles.
They actually are for people who don't know anything about apt/yum yet
and provides step-by-step information to them.

> There is no mention of yum with redhat 8.0 etc. either.

Right, because yum isn't yet available for 8.0 (and in turn, apt isn't
yet available for 7.x), so we don't yet have anything to document. We
will add the according documentation as soon as these packages are
available.

> It also doesn't contain any of the 
> introductory text that the "download" page does have currently.

Right, because the Download page already contains it ;-)))

But I'm not sure what exactly you expect. Did you already read the yum
introduction for 7.x? Does it fit your needs, or doesn't it? What does
it miss? We're open to any suggestions.

> In general it isn't an introductory document.

Maybe we have a different understanding of the word "introductory", but
to me the "yum on 7.x" document seems _very_ introductory as it guides
you through every single step that is needed to use Fedora Legacy in a
very detailed way.

> Also, much of the info for 
> yum and redhat 7.x will be the same for any redhat version  (that is a 
> side issue however).

Partly.

For 7.x, the user has to install yum1.

For 8.0 and 9 we have the issue that one can choose to install yum1 on
the buggy rpm that shipped with 8.0/9, or update rpm and use yum2
because yum1 isn't compatible with the updated rpm package.

For FC releases, we can skip parts of the documentation because yum is
already included in the official distribution.

Regarding apt I expect a single set of instructions match all supported
distributions because it has low dependencies.

I fear that a document that provides yum information for all
distributions will get large and complex because of many "If you have
7.x, do this, but if you have 8.0/9, do that" sections. Splitting it up
into different documents makes them easier to the reader; I think we
will come up with three docs for yum (7.x, 8.0/9, FC) and one page for
apt.

> The "Download" page has no links to where you can get apt or yum 
> preconfigured from (for example).

Right, because you should follow the To-be-renamed instructions that can
be found in "Using Fedora Legacy with yum on Red Hat 7.x", if you don't
yet have yum or apt. Please check my Download page suggestion; see
below.

From my point of view, the Download page is only for users that (1)
already have apt/yum installed and just want to use our repositories, or
(2) want to manually download packages by HTTP.

> 1) A documentation page which is introductory in style and contains all 
> the info needed for a non-expert to get started with clearly annotated 
> links for the detailed parts.  We could even call it a HOWTO :)  The FAQ 
> doesn't help someone trying to get set up either at the moment.

I have the very strong impression that you actually never read "Using
Fedora Legacy with yum on Red Hat 7.x", because it is exactly what you
want: Introductory in style, for non-expers, getting started, clearly
annotated links, HOWTO-style.

Would please check back on this document and give a feedback if it fits
your needs, and if not, what can be optimized to do so?

Eric, would you mind either changing the title of this document or give
it a special marker to better reflect that Joe Average should start
reading there?

> 2)  A download page that essentially just has links to where to download 
> things from.

It has a link to the repository, and it should provide repository
configuration examples in the future. As "Installing apt/yum" is not
equivalent with "Using Fedora Legacy", I would not simply give links to
download yum/apt to prevent users having the impression that installing
these RPMs would "make their system use Fedora Legacy", which really
isn't the case.

I have created an update for the "Download" page that hopefully
integrates the results of the ongoing discussion:

http://jonaspasche.de/fedoralegacy/download.html

Raphael, can you please comment on this? Your input is very valuable; it
would be good to know if this page answers your question in a better way
than the existing page. Any other list members, please feel free to give
feedback as well.

Thanks for all your help!

Jonas
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