custom package selection

[Chris Ricker]

On Thu, 24 Jul 2003, Dax Kelson wrote:

> > I've pretty much come to the conclusion that the severn installer has been 
> > dumbed down to the point that the only way to get a functional install that 
> > does what I want is to use kickstart
> 
> I dunno.
> 
> What's so important this is missing?
> 
> Personally, on desktops/laptops/etc I'll do an Everything install. I can
> afford the $4.30 of disk space and so much package related trouble just
> vanishes.

Cool! I've been looking for a sponsor to buy me a new laptop that actually
has a big enough hard drive to install Everything. Looks like I found one!

But enough sarcasm.

> On servers, I'll still do the smallest possible install for the task it
> needs to do.

The problem with that is that the installer won't let me do that. Some of 
the problems with cherry-picking:

* At least up through RHL 9, the group package selection stuff was very
  broken. Things you didn't select still got installed, things you
  deselected still got installed, things you selected didn't get installed.  
  Some time, if you're bored, spend some time customizing a RHL 9 install
  using the group-level stuff, then compare your customizations with
  install.log. There will be significant differences between what you
  selected and what you got. That might have changed some with the
  group-level dialog that's in the beta. I've not gotten to poke it much,
  since all the alphas were only installable on my systems using yum ;-).  
  We'll see.

* Some applications I want aren't in groups at all. Some groups, if you
  select the group, have mandatory components I don't want.

* Similarly, some apps are always mandatory. RHL always installs sendmail. I
  don't want sendmail. I only want postfix.  I can't do that w/o individual
  package selection. sendmail's currently mandatory, and that's not fixable
  w/o more efforts than RH feels it's worth.

You get the idea. kickstart's package selection solves those, and also 
offers some of the other tweaks that are now missing....

later,
chris