I've just run this same subject by fedora users on fedora-list.
There were lots of irrelevant responses advocating bittorrent and/or
jigdo, but neither addresses the same problem as simply as my proposal.
I don't think anyone who understood what I meant said it is a Bad Idea,
and certainly some agreed with the proposal.
There exists a problem for those who want both CD and DVD-sized images.
I've just done a census of the computers around here, and there's a few
that have CD drives, not DVD.
OTOH, where I have a DVD drive I do prefer the convenience of DVD-sided
images.
There's also the likelihood that some folk will want to give copies to
their mates, or distribute them at their PLUG, SLOG or OLUG, and often
the appropriate medium is a set of CDs.
I remember that when I last did NFS installs, Anaconda had the ability
to install from ISO images accessible by NFS, or from a local hard disk.
My proposal is to extend this to doing the same thing from ISO images.
That is, one could have nested ISO images (only one level!).
An example implementation might be this.
An CD (basically boot.iso) boots, and for a CD/DVD install, looks for a
set of .ISO images in a particular location, say /iso on the boot disk.
If present (and correct), it would offer the option of installing from
these .iso images.
If this functionality could be added to versions of Anaconda applicable
to currently-supported releases of RHEL, that would be really ace!
CentOS and the other clones would benefit too.
There would be advantages to everyone - RH, Fedora Project, mirrors &
clones, in terms of disk storage (compared with two sets of ISO images)
and bandwidth consumption.
Generally. users would be given the choice of installing directly from
the Internet or downloading a DVD image and then either burning a DVD or
a set of CDs.
I don't know the details of how Windows users manage CD images, but I
understand it's possible.
It would also be possible to enhance the boot.iso image, giving it the
abilities to
1. Eject the boot CD
2. Optionally mount a .iso from NTFS
3. Burn DVDs and/or CDs.
This would ensure a documentable standard procedure is available to
Windows users, rather than a vague statement about "refer to your
software's documentation" and hoping for the best.
_I_ may be wrong, but I don't think that this requires much work an
Anaconda Installer; basically it needs to run existing code in new
circumstances.
I also don't think that there's much to be done to add the .iso images
to boot.iso, I think the procedure would be to create the layout and run
mkisofs twice, once omitting the ISOs.
Adding the burning functionality to the boot iso could wait.
What do Anaconda hackers think?
--
Cheers
John
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