As in, make the installer one of the applications of a Fedora Core
Live CD? First thing it does is to copy the contents of its root
filesystem to the chosen root filesystem (should be faster than
`rpm'ing around lots and lots of packages, and saves CD space!), then
enables the user to select additional packages to install/remove.
Actually rpm packages compress the binary payload (gzip default,
configurable for bzip2), so uncompressed on cd storage would require more
space. Secondly cd read speed is slower (presumably) then your HD write
speed, so extracting & writing files should be faster then copying them
straight from cd.
However most importantly: While 'blow over all the files without doing that
fancy rpm stuff' sounds good in theory, did you ever think about how this
would work if you wanted to upgrade your fedora instalation? Using the 'just
copy' method this wouldnt be posible anymore, or wreck absolute havoc on
your dependencies. (And making seperate 'upgrade' and 'install' cd's
would
be a nightmare, so would be upgrading between releases using yum since that
doesnt do all that anaconda does, and/or ppl might not have a fast internet
connection, etc etc)
-- Chris