On Wed Feb 12 2003 at 16:46, Jesse Keating wrote: > Personally, I do all errata as a postinstall process. The Red Hat installer > has not been tested with new package sets, and isn't recommended to work. Pity that. > Doing the base install, then applying applicable errata has worked great for > us so far. It seems so wasteful (in several ways) to a fresh install of a system and then (manually or in a kickstart %post script) immediately do an rpm -U (or -F) over a big bunch of update packages. It would be _so_ cool to simply put (replace) the updates into (or alongside?) the installer's RedHat/RPMS/ directory, do a genhdlist and pkgorder (etc) over it all, then away you go. This issue really bit me (and others) hard with rh7.3 when I was happily going along rebuilding the installer itself... all was well and good -- until the kernel was updated to 2.4.18-<whatever> and the installer failed to build. Ouch. However, resorting to using the last kernel that did work (2.4.9-x iirc) for the installer did solve the problem, with the only post-install task left being to update to the new kernel. Perhaps there could be some mechanism added to the installer mechanisms so that if an "updates" directory existed then it would use that as a preferential package source to use before installing the original packages. (After making the appropriate sanity checks of course). That way you could even remove the obsoleted packages from the source tree. There would be some obvious and not-so-obvious technical issues to sort out (eg, install rather than update a new kernel), and from a distant perspecive I don't see why it couldn't be possible (eg, after creating a hdlist for the updates or whatever). Package updates are a fact of life. While the installer is primarily designed to install a distribution as originally released, it would be so useful if over time it could seamlessly cope with all the updates released for it. That being said, I admit that I'm not so familiar with the innards of anaconda, so I'm not so sure just how practical a suggestion this really is... I could be pi**ing into the wind :) [ ... snip on msg footer ... ] Oh, psyche-list? This really belongs in kickstart-list and/or anaconda-devel-list... (cross-posted to anaconda-devel to hit a more appropriate audience). Cheers Tony
