On Wed, 2006-04-12 at 20:04 +0200, Olivier Galibert wrote:
At this point, installing is a lottery as to whether the
applications
you need will be there, because no sane human has the attention span
to check every little submenu. Install everything was a way to win
this lottery by throwing money, i.e. hard drive space, at it. You can
always remove things afterwards, you don't need a media or a network
connection for that. Or, with current hard drive sizes, just leave it
that way and just don't start or configure what you don't need at a
particular point in time.
It seems to me that installing everything was mostly used as a way to
avoid what folks used to call "RPM dependency hell" (although frankly,
if you knew how to use RPM macros and a mirror, that was less a problem
than it was made out to be). Now that we have yum, this is not a
problem. You don't have to play the lottery at all; you can actually
select what the user really wants. If the software which the users are
asking for "every other day" is somewhat predictable, you don't even
have to use "*" as your glob for package installation.
> We give kickstart the ability to use globs. Problem solved.
So the only way to do real package selection or ensure that you won't
have to move around with a bag of cds is to drop anaconda and use
kickstart instead. Interesting.
It's not a "drop this/use that instead" proposition. Kickstart is a
method of anaconda, which allows you to do things in an automated
fashion. I'm confused; I thought you knew about kickstart already. The
only sane way to handle package selection IMHO is to class your
systems/users in some logical fashion and do kickstart installations.
If that class is to install "*", so be it. As someone who kept up with
several classrooms full of workstations and servers, and a laboratory
full of individual users, I don't see how you would want to do
installations any other way.
> Gets even more fun when Extras is involved, or other repos.
Then is it
> everything in the repo, everything in these repos, everything in these
> repos minus languages, so on and so forth.
Stop thinking blindly about "everything", and think about it in terms
of "select all, user can deselect parts afterwards".
Again, people have proffered the obvious, easy, well-supported, sane,
and low-maintenance solution in kickstart. Sitting down at every (or
*any*) station and clicking your way through an installation when you
don't have to is just wasting valuable time.
This is not to say that the multi-select button is wasteful either. But
if you're looking to save time on administering "200+" systems, check
out kickstart, like, yesterday. Cheers.
--
Paul W. Frields, RHCE
http://paul.frields.org/
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Fedora Documentation Project:
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