On Tue, 2005-12-20 at 13:23 +0530, Rahul Sundaram wrote: > Hi > > >Why not? You would ship such a CD and would ship additional CDs > >containing snapshots of subsets of the yum repositories. > > > >A "Fedora Office CD", e.g. would contain a repository snapshot of > >openoffice, firefox etc. and all of their infrastructure. > > > > > That would drive up the cost for redistribution. Fedora Projects ships > CDs/DVDs to many places all over the world. I don't understand this. You'd have different Fedora Distributions and different Fedora Distributors. Each one would be able to ship the collection of packages from the FC + FE he wants to ship. Users would be able to mix these distros (As all packages would originate from FC or FE). Vendors/VARs would be able to compile their collection of packages etc. The burdon/load of compiling CDs would be shifted away from RH, except if RH also wants to be one of these "vendors" To me sound like great progress over the current situation, the average user is facing with a fresh install of Fedora 4: * Download 4 ISOs/2.5GB of FC4 CDs (Many will also download the SRPM-ISOs) * Install from CD1 (In many cases the user will notice too late that he might not need some of the CDs). * Upon first run of yum, download at least half of the packages from updates anew, because they are outdated. * Start fiddling with yum's configuration to pull-in the packages you actually want. I.e. users using CDs actually waste bandwidth! Now try to install Fedora on several machines. Sophisticated users will find ways to reuse the packages they downloaded from updates and extras, beforehand (e.g. by setting up local yum repos or by sharing yum caches). Less sophisticated users will download everything anew. - I am sorry, but I can't find this method to be compelling ;) > >IMO, there is no reason to put GNOME in a privileged position. > >Those parts of it which are requirement of a "minimal install" are > >inevitable but anything else is waste of disc space. The same applies to > >GCC, python, Perl, ... simply any package. > > > > > Its not about GNOME as such but providing a targeted version of Fedora > for desktop users from a single CD. As it seems to me, I can't make it to you - I am questioning this kind of partitioning a distribution as a whole, because whatever you or RH considers "nominal desktop" is irrelevant to users. With the scheme outlined above, what you seem to have in mind would by "RH Fedora Desktop CD", i.e. RH would ship a _second_ CD in addition to CD1, containing those packages RH considers to be "their preferred" desktop. Ralf
