[Ambassadors] Media production idea

[Christoph Wickert]

Am Donnerstag, den 23.09.2010, 20:21 +0200 schrieb Zoltan Hoppar:
> How about to have an such discs where the media contains not only one
> desktop environment, else at least 4 of it... 4 LiveCD, the primary
> leading spins including with gnome based version with an common GRUB
> packed onto *one* bootable DVD. 

I like the idea, but I doubt that livecd-tools and anaconda support
this. In order to install different spins, we need to have different
images on one DVD. ATM livecd-tools do not support this. The different
spins then need to have one common grub as you already pointed out
correctly. I don't think that anaconda supports this.

It's definitely too late to target this for F14 (we are already late for
normal media production), but we can revisit this for F15. 

I'm a big fan of spins (I maintain two of them), but I'm starting to
wonder if the spins are the right approach, at least for the desktop
spins. They are just normal installations with some tweaks here and
there. All the packages are from our repositories (for good reason) and
the tweaks are just workarounds that should be obsoleted with better
packaging.

This leaves the package selection: Each desktop has a unique package
selection, a set of packages that fits best. IMHO this should be fixed
in anaconda. If one selects KDE instead of GNOME, anaconda should
automatically unselect evolution and select kmail instead. If someone
selects Sugar, he should get activities instead of applications. The
same goes for many other packages.

Long story short: Instead of fixing anaconda to handle a multiboot DVD,
we should fix anaconda's package selection algorithm. Take a look at the
OpenSUSE installer, they have done a great job there. If we do something
similar in anaconda, it would benefit all installations and not only the
spins.

Regards,
Christoph