On May 24, 2004, "Bryan J. Smith" <b.j.smith@xxxxxxxx> wrote: > I mean, is there a reason we need to maintain a 3+ CD set for FC, just > as to match the "legacy" design of old Red Hat Linux (RHL)? Here are my favorite reasons: Downloading an entire distro per machine installed isn't feasible for a large number of people in the world. Having a set of CDs that people can download once, install on a lot of machines, then install updates plus any additional packages over the Internet works; having to download the entire distro for every install isn't. Sure, local mirrors of Extras repositories may help alleviate the bandwidth, but you have to have a significant number of machines for this to actually make sense. Another issue is that Extras packages don't generally work right after a new Core release is out. You have to resort to using Extras repositories of earlier releases until they've installed the new release themselves, and mass-rebuilt the packages for it. This takes time. Since Fedora Core releases are already short-lived, and having to wait some time in order to install them makes it even shorter. And then, there's the issue of testing. The smaller the core, the fewer applications you'll get tested as part of the release process. No matter how competent the extras packagers are, unless they maintain a rawhide track of their repositories (and I don't think any of the major repositories do), their packages for a new distro will only begin getting tested when the new distro goes out. That means further instability and poorer user experience. IMHO, the ideal solution for this problem is to not shrink the core or split it from extras, but actually create a distro that contains core and extras CDs, giving the installer the ability to install these extras. Sure, people who push for the Extras don't get to maintain fewer packages, which was one of the main motivations of the Extras model, but the packages, being in the Core or in Extras, have to be maintained anyway. Taking them out of the distro CD set makes them unavailable to a lot of people, so let's instead start splitting package sets into Extras CDs: instead of CDs numbered 1 to 4, I envision having CD1 and maybe 2 with a small core, and then separate CDs for Extras. It is essential, however, that these Extras CDs be just a packaging artifact, as opposed to 2nd-class citizens in the distro. One tricky bit is how to name the CDs such that people can tell in advance what to download to be able to install the software they want. The other is how to rework the distro compose scripts such that they follow these packaging guidelines. None of these should be too hard. -- Alexandre Oliva http://www.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva/ Red Hat Compiler Engineer aoliva@{redhat.com, gcc.gnu.org} Free Software Evangelist oliva@{lsd.ic.unicamp.br, gnu.org}
