For a long, long time, anaconda has been pretty closely tied to a specific version of Fedora/RHEL/RHL. This is something which has slowly been getting a little bit better. As we continue to move forward and try to get contributions of other backends[1], I think that it's important we continue to move in this direction. As it stands today, if you boot with the rescue CD, you can enter an arbitrary repository path and be able to do an installation with the packages from there without any other real dependencies. I think that this is something which is very very valuable. Much more so than the existing boot.iso/diskboot.img. Given this, I'd like to propose some changes for anaconda over the timeframe of the next Fedora release: 1) Replace boot.iso/diskboot.img with an image analagous to rescuecd.iso (installcd.iso) 2) Make it so that selection of software repositories can be deferred to the second stage. There's already some basic repository selection for extra repositories; this would just be extending that to show the "base" repository as well 3) Instead of pointing to an installation tree in the loader (for pxe installs and maybe still diskboot.img), you should point at an "installer location". This will definitely include the location of stage2. It may also be metadata to point to an installation tree so that we can preserve existing behavior. 4) Split out the majority of what's currently under scripts/ in anaconda CVS into their own package/repository. This should contain the distro specific bits related to creating an install image. 5) Make sure that the scripts in 4 make it easy to just create an installcd.iso. Then, while we may want to have them generated with the daily rawhide push for Fedora, we can also keep versions around for people to test with and also make it easier to push an "installer test" Does this make sense to people and seem like it would help some in developing changes as well as doing testing for anaconda? Jeremy [1] Hopefully we'll start getting some of the ConaryBackend bits in. I'm also going to probably be throwing together a backend to install from an "image" with live CDs.
