Suggestion for a new Download page

Jonas Pasche mail at jonaspasche.de
Thu Feb 5 18:58:16 UTC 2004


Hi Raphael,

> I should say straight off that there may be something fundamental about 
> yum that I don't understand.  I am getting the impression that you need 
> a special version of yum to use fedora-legacy and not just the correct 
> yum.conf with any old version of yum. Is this right?

No, that's not correct. yum repositories are always the same,
independent of the yum version of the client. Fedora Legacy provides a
yum repository that can be used by both yum1 and yum2.

You don't need a special version of yum to use Fedora Legacy, but we
want to encourage people to use our packages, mainly because (1) they
are preconfigured and thus easier to use and (2) they have GPG checks
enabled and thus more secure.

> I'm a little confused by that. I am using yum on redhat 8.0 with 
> fedora-legacy.

No problem, yum is available from its original source for every Red Hat
distribution. It's simply not available from _us_ in a preconfigured
state for every supported distribution.

However, there is absolutely no problem to install yum directly from
linux.duke.edu and configure it to use our repositories, which is what
you did, judging from your description.

> Do you mean there isn't a downloadable yum rpm with yum.conf 
> preconfigured for fedora legacy?

There is only a preconfigured yum for 7.x, but not for 8.0.

There is no preconfigured apt yet, neither for 7.x nor for 8.0.

The word "preconfigured" is the key here - for sure there _are_ working
yum and apt packages that can be manually configured to use our repos.

> There can be documentation for how to 
> use redhat 8.0 with fedora-legacy can't there?

There could be such documentation, however, it would point people to
different locations for yum/apt downloads and then tell them how to
configure our repos. As at least an apt package for 8.0 is available
through bugzilla waiting for QA, we should focus on publishing it
instead of creating documentation for workarounds.

> a) upgrade rpm b) 
> download yum from the yum home page (or get one with yum.conf for FL 
> already configured for you) c) (if needed) update yum.conf for FL .  I 
> would strongly suggest that any new docs tell people to upgrade rpm to a 
> less broken version as the version that comes with redhat 8.0 (at least) 
> is truely awful.

There's an ongoing discussion on this issue; please check the list
archives. This is no easy decision, and every solution has tradeoffs.

> Any redhat 7.x user who finds that page and has a basic 
> idea what fedora-legacy and yum are will be happy.

Can you check back on the site after Eric has made updates? What do you
think about is suggestion to put the docs for using yum on 7.x under a
"Getting started..." section - would that help you to find the right
information? Do you have a better suggestion?

I see a small problems for unexperienced users when they find
documentation for yum _and_ apt for their distribution because they
don't know either of it and thus cannot simply make a decision which one
they want to use.

On the other hand, we cannot simply focus on one of these tools and
declare the other one as unsupported, because both tools have strong
user communities. I'm thinking about a sentence like "If you don't know
anything about these tools, we suggest you to try yum first, as it comes
with fewer options and fewer complexity than apt. You can always choose
between both tools, even later, if you want to try apt instead."

> > 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...
>
> I think this is first thing I actually disagree with.  The download 
> section should surely help you download whatever you need to download.   
> For most people that will be yum/apt preconfigured.  A simple line to 
> the effect that "If you are just starting then please go here to get 
> everything preconfigured" would do of course on the download page if you 
> felt that was more appropriate but there should still be links to show 
> where to download yum and apt from as well IMHO.

Okay, I don't have a problem to have link to yum or apt on the Download
page, as long as there is a strong note that installing yum or apt alone
_does not provide any updates_. It only installs a package manager,
nothing else, just like paying for a gym membership doesn't make your
body slim. :)

> I suggest for the documentation page the following (the titles are just 
> suggestive )
> 
> a) What is fedora-legacy?
> b) What are these yum and apt things?
> c) How do I get started?
> (redhat 7.x, redhat 8.0, redhat 9 instructions)
> d) What else is there to know?
> e) How do I participate?

Thanks; I'll note these title for further updates to the documentation
page. Anyway, at least questions a) and b) could be answered by a single
paragraph in the FAQ, which is - from my point of view - the place where
short answers should go.

> and then appears to go on to list some mirror sites (actually files but 
> would anyone know why the difference is important?).

I'm not sure on this. My suggestion is to wait until mirrors are really
available and then talk about the Mirrors page again.

Jonas
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