Fedora 21 installation: a suggestion

[Adam Williamson]

On Sun, 2014-11-02 at 12:32 -0500, Gene Czarcinski wrote:
> Fedora 21 has introduced a new/different approach to packaging of the 
> distribution software: "productized" collections of packages which are 
> installed via a Live Install.  At first I was not sure I liked the 
> approach but have come around to liking it a lot.

That's not really quite accurate. Of the products, only Workstation has
a live deliverable. Cloud's primary deliverables are disk images.
Server's are a 'DVD' and a netinst.

> And then there is Fedora-Server-netinst.  This netinstall is the only 
> vehicle which gives the user complete control over package selection 
> (especially when using kickstart).  But, it is labeled "Fedora Server"??
> 
> Suggestion:  As far as I can tell, it would not cost that much to do a 
> "special" build and only harvest boot.iso to create 
> Fedora-Netinst-<whatever>.iso

It's not actually quite that simple, unfortunately.

This is something that's been discussed, tweaked and argued over heavily
between fesco, releng, qa, anaconda and whoever else throughout F21
cycle. Having an installer tree which exists solely to produce a generic
netinst (and possibly also upgrade.img) was an option discussed at one
point but it's not as simple as you think it is, according to releng.

Having Server as the only netinst is more or less a fudge that's been
agreed for Beta and Final, but it's actually not a bad one and covers
quite a lot of the problems we had with various other approaches
throughout 21 cycle. I think it's probably what we'll stick with for
Final, AFAIK. Not sure if there's a plan to redo things for 22.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | XMPP: adamw AT happyassassin . net
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