Installing F7 by CD and not by DVD

[Bruno Wolff III]

On Sun, Jun 03, 2007 at 15:24:31 -0400,
  Tony Nelson <tonynelson at georgeanelson.com> wrote:
> At 4:05 PM +0100 6/3/07, Timothy Murphy wrote:
> >Paul Osunero wrote:
> >
> >> But, one thing that has worked for me in the past was to do something
> >> along the lines of....
> >>
> >> 1.  Download the DVD.
> >> 2.  Mount the DVD iso on a loop device.
> >> 3.  Go to the directory containing all the RPMs
> >> 4.  Run "rpm -Fvh *rpm".
> >>
> >> There may be a few dependency issues to work around...and or some order
> >> dependent stuff.  But it becomes fairly obvious.
> >
> >Have you really tried this?
> >It seems to me almost certain to fail.
> >Also it is going to take forever to check all the rpms,
> >and I would be amazed if there were not dozens of inconsistencies.
> 
> He claims to have done it.  It should mostly almost work.  AIUI,
> "--freshen" won't handle packages that are renamed.  "--aid" might also be
> useful.

This is how I currently do updates. That is not going to "just" work.
Not only are package renames a problem, but you have to specially handle
rpms that have architecture subtypes (kernel, glibc). If you are mostly
up to date, you can usually just do rpm -Fvh *686*.rpm first. But if there
are dependencies that need to be upgraded at the same time, this can be
a real pain.

Another important issue is now that extras has been merged with core, you
can't do rpm -Fvh *.rpm because there are too many files. There is a kernel
patch that has been developed to remove this limitation, but I don't know
if it has been accepted into the main line. I asked on the fedora-devl
list if the patch was going to make it into Fedora's version of the kernel
soon, but didn't get a response. You can't work around this with xargs,
because you don't know what things needed to be grouped together. If you
go to the trouble to figure that out, you are probably best off making a
local repository and using yum.

Another grief causer is packages that aren't getting updated (because they are
3rd party or have been dropped from Fedora) can pin packages you want to
upgrade. This can take a lot of manual work to clean up.