Maurice F. Piller wrote:
Fedora Core 1 came out with 3 iso installation images. Has the size of the Fedora Core 2 release been determined yet?
[snip]
A few comments for the discussion:
- As has already been mentioned, enough people want different sets of packages to make it impossible to place packages such that the majority only needs 2 CDs. - There is the issue with package ordering. - Something that hasn't been mentioned: When fedora extras really gets going we're going to have an even bigger problem when it comes to upgrades. Imagine I'm upgrading from Fedora 2 to Fedora 3 and I have many extras packages installed. I download the 2/3 CDs for Fedora *Core*. I start an upgrade... anaconda finds some extras installed that depend on an old version of a package in core which it is about to upgrade. So it removes that extra package. If this happens for many packages it's not good news! Perhaps someone can comment on how likely this scenario is (one would hope that newer packages maintain backwards compatibility, or compat packages are provided... but this is not always the case). - Obviously for an initial install you can just ignore extras and add them later. But as soon as you add them you hit the upgrade problem above. A solution is are mentioned below, but this does not really help users without sufficient internet access speed or capacity. What do we do for these users? Will we need to provide CDs of extras?
Some thoughts on solutions:
- Increased prominence of network based installs/upgrades. This has been mentioned already. This means people don't need to download 2 CDs worth of data to then only use 300Mb from each. - Network installs can also pick up extras repositories (either automatically or allow the user to specify - I would suggest the former). This solves the upgrade problem above. - Change how anaconda works (DANGER WILL ROBINSON ;]) so that there is a base set of packages that gives you a barebones system (there has already been discussion about this), and each CD is more like a repository - ala Debian. Users on poor internet connections can get CDs (off friends/whatever) that contain the majority of packages they use, and use network means to fetch any odd ones from CDs they don't have. So if I have lots of packages from CDs "FC1" and "FC2" and "FE1" (Fedora Extras), but only 10 packages off "FC3" and "FE2" I can have the benefits of CDs for most of what I need, but without having to get a full set of them.
I am not proposing most of this for FC2 (certainly as it seems extras will not be there). However, it is obviously going to need some thinking about. There is a lot more to think about than the above - I only seek to raise awareness that intrusive changes may need to be made, so the sooner it's discussed the better.
If these issues have already been discussed and either dismissed or solutions found, I would be interested to know what's planned!
Cheers