Jeremy Katz wrote:
On Fri, 2004-01-02 at 13:56, Jon Atkinson wrote:
It would be nice, when Fedora has matured a little (FC3/4?) to see a higher level of support and promotion of the FTP install feature. I know anaconda does support FTP installs, but there is very little in the way of (obvious) documentation of this feature, and from what I've heard and personal experience it is a little flaky. I am an ex-Debian user and I liked the way I could burn a 50mb ISO and run the installer then fetch packages from a local mirror. I know not everyone has DSL access, but a large and growing number of people do, and I think it may soon be time to rethink the ISO distribution model.
I've done the floppy install (series of 4 floppies) of Debian before. I liked the network install, though Debian didn't meet my particular needs. I also downloaded and burned a whole series of CDROMs and it only used the first CD. (A big waste, but a learning experience). I think that their other concept of selecting desired programs that then create your customized installations is a good approach, if dependencies could be met through the selector.
It might serve Fedora to have such a capability, though it sounds like it would be a nightmare to implement successfully.
As far as Fedora's maturity level. I used RH since verson 5.2 (4.2 for some unix learning, but 5.2 for regular usage). I think that Fedora is the best level that I've ever seen it reach. It'll never mature, it is always growing, thus the 3 CDs needed for the later installations.
As of Fedora Core 1, the FTP install should be just as nice as every other install method as you can do graphical FTP installs (assuming a certain minimal amount of RAM so that we can pull the entire second stage down or using the rescue cd image to start your install). As Jef said, there's not much in the way of docs of anything, but I don't see how you can get more prominent mention than having it listed on the install type screen with everything else :)
Instead of the installation option being kind of hidden, it would be nice to see it available as a choice when the first disc booted up. Alternatively, a credit card model with just ftp / http installation starting might be a good idea. I heard mention of a boot.iso, so it must already exist and is or can be offered within the regular directory that contains the usual 6 discs. ( rpms, srpms)
If you've had specific problems, *please* report them in bugzilla. I am not at all a mind reader and I can't fix things unless they're reported.
As far as future stuff, I think that HTTP is actually far more relevant than HTTP, but since the installer code is virtually identical for the two, that's irrelevant. I'd like to get to where we can have a simple mirror list available and you can get sort of a "choose your mirror" sort of things for where to do your install from, but I'm not sure that's going to happen in the timeframe for FC2. Especially as the time is dwindling for making large installer changes (I tend to try to stop those by the first test release so that sane testing can be achieved)
This sounds like a worthwhile enhancement. I'd most likely use these planned enhancements.
As far as the distribution size. I was looking forward to a 4 gig DVD offering. I like the smaller sized programs and find them useful. I also like the more megabyte hungry programs that are currently offered.
Thanks for the hard work set forth so far. I get bored with trying to learn how to program apps, but hope to eventually buckle down and start contributing fixes and such later.
Cheers,
Jeremy
Jim