Bryan J. Smith wrote:
Now many have suggested, heck I even started out by taking Pritchard'sThis is indeed a big can of worms. To further complicate the matter, you always need to keep the upgrade path in mind to. If someone is running redhat 8,9, fedora core 1 or 2, they should be able to download the install cd's and upgrade their existing system.. This means a whole lot of packages _have_ to be included to provide compat-XYZ or newer versions of the already installed packages. This kind of means that 90% of the existing packages are automaticly tied in on the install cd's.
post, about "rolling back" the size of Fedora Core. Talk of moving
things to Extras, or elsewhere. But by the very nature of Core v.
Extras, there may be legacy/compatibility issues to consider.
So with that in mind, what profit can still be gained by re-ordering packages around on cd's, and making minimal install cd's?
IMHO you could make the first cd a "Basic but relatively complete" install cd, which includes all basic apps, web browsers, basic services and server apps, yum, system-config-packages, etc; Which you could use to install a new functional and working Workstation, or Server installation.
The other (3) cd's would include all the other packages that are currently in fedora core 2, and should be listed and described in the comps / rpmdb-fedora packages.
Then if you do a clean install it would only use the first CD to do the basic install, run thru first-boot, and allow people to add additional packages from either the 3 extra's cd's (it would know where they are and ask for the correct cd by looking that up in the comps / rpmdb-fedora lists), or offer the option to download them from a selected mirror.
However if you do an upgrade using the first cd, it can use the knowledge of what packages are on what cd's to include those in the upgrade, and do a clean and sound upgrade (asking for those cd's as it does now).
As far as i can think off thats the only way to satisfy the upgrade cycle dependency, while allowing for a 1 core cd install.
Ofcource then the question becomes "What packages do we include on the core cd". To be able to play around with that question i've written a little tool in PHP which i've posted in a seperate email (Subject: A usefull tool (Was: Making Fedora Core CD #1 Standalone)).
You would be supprised at how much you can still include on the first CD.. With that tool you can show that all this paranoia about "Don't include any, *0* apps on the core CD" is being overly zealous..
Your able to fit quite a large collection of workstation and server packages on one CD.. The mix that i came up with playing with the dep-tree tool is:
./dep-tree.php -d firstboot system-config-packages mozilla yum rpm mdadm cups vixie-cron httpd samba jfsutils php perl usbutils isdn4k-utils irda-utils metacity gnome-desktop gnome-session gnome-panel compat-db compat-libstdc++ compat-glibc openssh openssh-server openssh-clients openldap samba screen magicdev openmotif xmms gedit lm_sensors ntp gnome-utils autofs setserial nmap mgetty stunnel curl eject nautilus-cd-burner nautilus-media lsof wget telnet ftp gnome-applets gftp openoffice.org gimp gaim links mkinitrd mktemp ttmkfdir mkbootdisk xpdf eog gcc autoconf automake15 autoconf213 automake automake14 make
Number of packages: 457
Total size installed: 1557 Mb
Total packaged size: 498 Mb
So this includes (i think) all the basic packages for a working linux instalation, qt/gnome/kde/motif compatiblity, mozilla, gimp, gaim, openoffice and lots of other workstation apps, and all required basic server apps (webserver, openssh, telnet, ftp, yum, nmap, screen, wget, links etc)
The nice thing of this is that the first CD can then offer 4 install modes: - Basic Workstation - Basic Server - Both server and workstation software - Minimal instalation (90 or so megs, already included in FC1/2) [x] checkbox Include development packages and tools
While still offering a fully functional end result, and including all *-devel packages and compilers so the system is self-building and allows you to compile kernels, source rpm's or tarbals (imho it would go against the spirit of *nix / open source to have a system that could not compile software or it's self)
Then if they want all KDE apps, more server software, a slow of perl-* packages, databases, then the extra 3 cd's come into play (and/or external repositories)
