Respins

[Les Mikesell]

On Wed, 2006-01-25 at 11:50, lists at ralii.com wrote:
>   Perhaps going forward life would be easier if
> > (a) fedora had a "seriously-minimal" install that was just
> > enough to get yum working and (b) things that are almost-rebrands
> > could be easily built with an rpm that adds one or more
> > repositories where high-level choices are done in meta-packages
> > or groups.  This would permit installing a minimum of outdated
> > code and let all concerned parties maintain their philosophical
> > purity concerning what they permit in their own repositories
> > without making a complete rebranding operation necessary.
> > 
> > 
> 
> I believe part of this idea is already being done....  If you look
> at the work being done on anaconda, it sounds like they are trying
> to allow it to connect to a myriad of backends (currently: CD, HD,
> NFS, FTP, HTTP) which would allow it to connect to a yum
> repository, it sounds like.  Once this work is done, the idea of
> re-spins becomes minimal for those with connections, as I could
> do the install off of a network-based repository or perhaps a
> "local mirror" that I am copying.  It might even open up the
> ability during install of saying go get "Extras" or "livna" or
> whatever, but that may be a couple of versions down the road
> (i.e. maybe not in FC5, but perhaps FC6 time frame).....

I'n not sure that it should be part of the initial install so
as to divorce the politics of the distro building the installer
from the details of what ends up being installed.  For example,
I don't forsee anyone related to fedora doing anything to
make it convenient to install something from livna, realplayer,
sun java, flash, etc, etc. without specific end user
intervention.  What we need is a 'one-step' choice unrelated
to the base install that makes it as easy as possible to add the
rest of the packages for some particular focus regardless
of where they come from.  And if it is done in terms of
yum groups it should be straightforward to closely duplicate
things across fedora, RHEL, and Centos without having to re-do
anything except the actual packages in some repository.

-- 
  Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com