Feature idea: package an installer image as a grub entry before F8. Was [ Re: Very much packages with fc6 tag instead of fc7 in the FC7 tree ]

[Will Woods]

On Thu, 2007-05-31 at 21:35 -0400, Colin Walters wrote:
> On Fri, 2007-06-01 at 13:37 -0400, Will Woods wrote:
> 
> > Start "live-updater" tool
> >   - Checks installed packages, as anaconda does
> >   - Downloads all updated packages 
> >     - (Alternately: use a DVD iso and it would only 
> 
> I wouldn't even make it a tool you manually start - integrate into the
> pirut update mode so when the next version of Fedora comes out, you get
> a notification and it offers to start downloading it in the background.
> (I also think pirut should be downloading regular updates in the
> background instead of a window)

I thought yum-updatesd had a flag to download updates in the background
but I might be mistaken about that..

But yeah, having this integrated into puplet/pirut *would* be
extra-cool.

> > The downside is that it requires a few gigs of free drive space, 
> 
> A few gigs?  Couldn't we download just a CD size image?  I think it's
> kind of silly that Fedora makes DVD images so prominent in the download
> page - who actually wants to download *everything*?  I know I sure don't
> want GNOME+KDE+XFCE for example.

Right, but assuming that you installed a fairly standard package set
you'd still have to download upgrades for all those packages on your
system. If you installed 2 CDs worth of packages initially you're gonna
need to download 2 CDs worth of updates to your hard drive - that's
1-2GB of free space you'll need to hold the packages. Plus extra space
for actually performing the updates. So.. a couple gigs of free drive
space is needed for temporary storage of updates.

> Also if someone picks this up, I would try hard to make it something
> scriptable so a regression tester can try periodic upgrades during the
> development process and see how they go.  (Recently become a fan of
> writing tests as early as possible again =))

Oh definitely. In fact, that's the main reason *I* care about this
feature. Live-ish upgrades would be a cool feature and save our users
some time, but making system upgrades easier to script is the icing on
the cake for me.

-w

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