Kickstart-list Digest, Vol 79, Issue 11

[Chris Lumens]

> I'm just surprised that almost 5 years later, it's still not in RHEL!

Not five years:

   commit 5fb4af761cdc87b4025681e5306015a5f6adb560
   Author: Chris Lumens <clumens at redhat.com>
   Date:   Fri Aug 24 15:41:44 2007 +0000

       Add support for the %end directive, and issue DeprecationWarnings if it's not
       used.

And it will be in RHEL6.  Keep in mind that we have to keep
compatibility in RHEL for a very long time, so there was no point in
introducing it for RHEL5.  In RHEL6 it's recommended like it's been in
Fedora forever, and in RHEL7 it will be required like it is in F14.

> It doesn't help that Anaconda doesn't plainly show its version ID
> to the user during kickstart, and that its various web
> documentation doesn't show or distinguish what version is being
> documented, which might have clued me in that there were such
> wide-apart versions in current use.

anaconda currently prints its version number in the startup messages:

   if (FL_RESCUE(flags)) {
      fmt = _("Running anaconda %s, the %s rescue mode - please wait.\n");
   } else {
      fmt = _("Running anaconda %s, the %s system installer - please wait.\n");
   }
   printf(fmt, VERSION, getProductName());

In the log files:

   logMessage(INFO, "anaconda version %s on %s starting", VERSION, getProductArch());

And in tracebacks:

   lst.insert(0, "%s %s exception report\n" % (self.conf.programName, self.conf.programVersion))

In addition, given any kickstart file, ksvalidator (from the pykickstart
package) can tell you whether it's syntactically correct for any version
of RHEL or Fedora, back as far as RHEL3.

- Chris