Jigdo (was Re: Installing from the 3 DVD fedora 8 "Everything" re-spin

[G.Wolfe Woodbury]

On Fri, Dec 28, 2007 at 05:21:00AM -0700, Karl Larsen wrote:
> Dean S. Messing wrote:
>> If you use the above jigdo link, the stuff inside is from the original
>> Fedora 7 release, dated 13th November 2007.  So, I've downloaded
>> alotabits for nothing.  Oh well.  Learned how to jigdo.
>>
>    Ah well, I wonder if you wound up with proper .iso files or were they 
> .iso.tmp? And it is not clear to me that jigdo is really working for Fedora 
> yet.

It took me about 30 minutes of head-scratching and research (not too unlike
Mr. Day's) to figure out jigdo a few days ago.  It was not that pleasant
an experience while going through it, but the resulting understanding and
success with "downloading" and creating the 17 CDs of the Fedora Unity
8 Everything spin was quite exhilarating.

Jigsaw Downloading is conceptually similar to the bittorrent methods in
that they both solve a problem by deconstructing a large object and get
the pieces in smaller chunks rather than in one large single request.

Here at the homestead I keep a local mirror of i386, x86_64 and SRPMs for
releases 7 and 8 and rawhide.  I manually run rsync sometime during the
day to keep them uptodate. [I could easily automate the sync, but I need
to occasionally skip syncs if my connection is busy with other high
volume connections.]  This made the jigdo process incredibly fast for me.

I fetched the Fedora Unity .jigdo file, tweaked the pointers to look at
the local repository first, and corrected a little buglet (filed in BZ),
then it set it off with the appropriate jigdo-lite command.  About 35
minutes later I had 17 CD ISOs sitting on my drive that I could burn and
give to my brother who wanted to move to FC8 and couldn't spend the time
to download all the necessary stuff on a lower speed connection.

So, for me jigdo is a *big* win.  Yes, the documentation could stand a
lot of work in terms of clarifying the procedures and what actually needs
to be done in what order, but it wasn't that hard (for me) to get my head
around the underlying elegance of the Jigsaw process.

Of course, Your Mileage May Vary.

-- 
Wolfe
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