New Install Idea

[Gain Paolo Mureddu]

Robert Spangler wrote:

>-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
>Hash: SHA1
>
>Hi all,
>
>I was just wondering if there are and install packages out there like the new 
>Debian Install?  I find this approach to be the most optimal since you are 
>always installing the latest version of the software.
>
>If there isn't any, are there any plans in the works to get something like 
>this setup?
>
>
>- -- 
>
>Regards
>Robert
>
>Smile... it increases your face value!
>-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
>Version: GnuPG v1.2.6 (GNU/Linux)
>
>iD8DBQFB/Q2l0xJrO8dQYHgRAlu5AJoCyPOwaBZGKw9PB6XhlgMZZGG9mwCeIM38
>4L/TMv14aLuY0Py5GgfVob0=
>=iRGU
>-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
>
>  
>
This is really a nice idea... I'd add to this idea some annotations:

It'd be incredibly awesome to make Anaconda use some modified version of 
yum or up2date, after transfering the installation image into the target 
computer. I think the best way would be to leave the installer pretty 
much the same as it is now, and just add a little check box at the 
install type/package selection screens to check for updates of the 
selected packages, then when the installation process really starts, and 
after transfering the image (with basic rpm, yum/up2date tools) to the 
disk, yum may check for updates of the selected packages and then 
internally mark them to be downloaded and installed from one of the 
mirror sites, while still installing the rest of the packages off the CD 
rom (lets face it, NOT all the packages in the CD's have been updated!). 
I see a couple downsides to this approach, though:

1) As pointed out, the bandwidth requirements... Not everybody has 
broad-band, and even among broadband users there are circumstances where 
this is simply not quite justifiable, like cases where the total 
bandwidth is only 128k to 256k downstream... At times even a 512k 
downstream connection seems VERY slow nowadays!
2) The overhead of RPM interdependency solving may really slow things 
down, especially for lower-end machines.
3) The memory foot-print of the installer may be too large to be 
practical to implement this way (thus my proposal of using an on disk 
image for this). Sounds like a good idea, but may be too hard to 
implement and even unjustified... Last time I tried to use rpm from a 
chroot'ed environment I wasn't too successful so this may be perfectly 
done, just I don't know how.

Another idea (as already pointed out) would be to have a LiveCD install 
only which would only download and install the packages to the chroot'ed 
disk environment, without installing packages from the CD, this would 
require a QUITE fast connection (something in the order of 6Mbits/s)