Re: How this bug can come out of its dead-end? Any suggestions?!

[Hedayat Vatankhah <hedayat@xxxxxxxx>]

Kevin Kofler <kevin.kofler@xxxxxxxxx> wrote on 05/09/2010 9:24:04 PM +0450:

Frank Murphy wrote:
  

That *should not* be default for most users,
as it will end up breaking quite a lot,
if used with other repos. (updates,updates-tesing, 3rd party)

as %requires may have changed quite a bit since DVD was released.
    

That shouldn't be a problem as long as updates is enabled.

A more pertinent reason not to enable this by default is that many users 
will misplace the DVD and prefer just downloading the packages. Many of them 
have updates anyway.
  

For those users, they will receive updated packages from the internet if there are any updates. And if there isn't any, yes the packages will be installed from DVD. But this doesn't seem to be much inconvenience, and also will be the natural thing to happen IMHO. I think the reasons for having this enabled by default (while I've never talked about having it enabled by default; being able to enable it using the software sources selection is much much more convenient than the current workarounds) are more acceptable. Anyway, I've never talked about having them enabled by default.

And to really suit users with no or a very slow Internet connection, we'd 
also have to disable updates by default which we definitely DO NOT want.
  

No. It would suffice if PackageKit disables/discards online repositories when there is no network connection and enables them otherwise. Interestingly, the latest packagekit in Fedora 13 disables online repositories (and print errors) if their connection time out (and so it is still usable), but will print errors and stops working if system is offline! (it should do the same thing when offline). So, you can have the online repositories enabled by default and suit such users at the same time.

As I've already said more than once, IMHO we should just add "broadband 
Internet connection" to Fedora's system requirements, it's effectively 
already required. Sure, you can get it to work without it with some manual 
workarounds, but for Fedora to work properly out of the box, and to get 
updates (including security fixes, critical bugfixes etc.), you need a 
(reasonably fast) Internet connection.
  

1. Such manual workarounds can be fixed pretty easy; and IMHO they should be fixed anyways. Everybody might sometimes be offline, and should be able to work reasonably in that cases too (e.g. it is really ridiculous to be unable to remove a package from your system when you are offline because yum/packagekit cannot update repository metadata!). Also I think the ability to install packages from installation media (and any removable media containing a repository) is still reasonable too (you can get updates as soon as you are online again).

2. Almost all modern OSes provide updates, so do you want to say that a user with no or poor internet connection should not use them?!! Also notice that most of security fixes are not that important for such users anyway! Also, Fedora is not the only Linux distribution who have such online repositories; Debian has had them even at the times which broadband internet connection was not so common (and this is IMHO why its package manager treats such users much better).

Thanks,
Hedayat

        Kevin Kofler

  

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