FC2 test 1

[Alexandre Oliva]

On Feb 12, 2004, Bill Nottingham <notting at redhat.com> wrote:

> Alexander Dalloz (alexander.dalloz at uni-bielefeld.de) said: 
>> Sorry, I meant: stay at 3 binary CDs plus the sources CDs.

> There's two conflicting schools of thought here:

> 1) get Extras going, move chunks of Core to Extras, and have
>    Core be 2-3 binary CDs
> 2) get Extras going, but put even more stuff in Core, have Core
>    go to 5,6,7 CDs

> Personally, I'd go for door #1.

Going with #1 means to me that less people will be using test releases
day to day, because stuff they rely on for day to day work will only
be in Extras that will likely not be available for the short life of
test releases.

Frankly, I don't care too much if the core release grows to more CDs.
Software grows, it's just a fact of life.  Having more stuff in the
core means it takes more work to maintain it, but having it in extras
will also require it to be maintained, and will just make it take
longer for a release to be useful for people who rely on stuff that's
only available in extras.

Of course, ideally it should be possible to not have to have every CD
in order to do a smallish installation.  Getting more brains into the
CD layout programs would enable different kinds of installs to use
different sets of CDs (Base system; Gnome/KDE; etc).  And the
installer could be improved to enable you to fetch those few missing
packages you'd like to install but don't want to have to download or
burn CDs off the net.  This might be easily accomplished by leaving a
note for firstboot to process directing it to install off the net
packages whose CDs the user failed to supply, which would currently
cause the installation to abort.  I realize there may be dependency
issues to be addressed here, and maybe even RPM improvements that
would be required, but it would sure be a nice feature to have!

-- 
Alexandre Oliva   Enjoy Guarana', see http://www.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva/
Happy GNU Year!                     oliva@{lsd.ic.unicamp.br, gnu.org}
Red Hat GCC Developer                 aoliva@{redhat.com, gcc.gnu.org}
Free Software Evangelist                Professional serial bug killer