On May 24, 2004, Dave Jones <davej@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > I'd really like to see us get to the stage where an install just > installs a bare-bones system[1], and after booting, firstboot runs > system-config-packages to pull in anything else we desire. This is not such a good idea for a machine that needs all of the extras installed before it boots up and start running say sendmail, because people want to use these add-ons for their mail delivery. sendmail is just an example; any other daemons that are started and can be configured with kickstart rules to do the right thing suddenly get trickier if the core is missing the packages and kickstart won't let you do non-interactive up2date installs because it wants up2date configuration to be confirmed. After a kickstart install, I'd like to machine to be as ready for use as possible. Deferring installation of most of the distro to post-installation time sounds like an oxymoron to me. Now if only firstboot would run before the installer reboots, or before any services are started, you might have a case, but having firstboot run after a server comes up and starts pretending to serve stuff correctly is a Very Bad Idea (TM). I understand the wish to move stuff out of the installer. Having the installer run additional programs at the end, instead of after a reboot, would help take code out of the installer, and might be seen as a good thing for many. However, one of the good things about anaconda is that it asks all questions first, and then proceeds to install without any need for additional interaction, except for the click for reboot at the end. Adding a necessary firstboot step to select and install additional packages would add a second major interaction before the install can be said to be finished, followed by a potentially long delay as additional packages are downloaded and installed. And then, probably yet another reboot just to make sure things are all set and in place. This sounds *very* undesirable to me. -- 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}
