About unofficial FC4-ISOs

[Stefan Neufeind]

Hi,

I lately remembered the discussion about updated, unofficial FC4-ISOs
(aka "respins") and found the URL again on the mailinglist-archive:

http://fedora.isphuset.no/

Great job Hans did. I wonder if it might be possible to offer them
officially? Especially with FC4 some quite important install-problems
have been fixed, e.g. due to a more recent kernel. If Redhat does not
want to put the burden of additional traffic and disc-space on it's
servers and mirrors then maybe it would be possible to officially
validate the build distributed by Torrent and offer such a torrent
officially?

The service Hans offers is really, really great for the community.
However I see that for some people it might be a problem of trust
(security) to use ISOs from _some_ source. So in case Fedora might see a
chance to either bundle respins from time to time and distribute those
on torrent officially or validate the integrity of Hans' current ISOs
maybe they could declare them official FC4.2?


Kind regards,
 Stefan Neufeind, Germany

[Matthew Miller]

On Sat, Nov 26, 2005 at 01:21:55AM +0100, Stefan Neufeind wrote:
>  Great job Hans did. I wonder if it might be possible to offer them
>  officially? Especially with FC4 some quite important install-problems 
With FC having such a short lifecycle, I don't think it's worth the work
it'd take -- FC5 is the updated FC4....

Also, while I'm sure the person doing this is completely good and honest,
Red Hat's lawyers would probably have to be more careful.

-- 
Matthew Miller           mattdm(a)mattdm.org          <http://mattdm.org/>
Boston University Linux      ------>              <http://linux.bu.edu/>

[Stefan Neufeind]

Matthew Miller wrote:
>  On Sat, Nov 26, 2005 at 01:21:55AM +0100, Stefan Neufeind wrote:
>  
> >Great job Hans did. I wonder if it might be possible to offer them
> >officially? Especially with FC4 some quite important install-problems
>  
>  With FC having such a short lifecycle, I don't think it's worth the work
>  it'd take -- FC5 is the updated FC4.... 
I agree about the short lifecycle - I really like that for several
fields of use. But the idea of a respin was not about bundling big, new
releases - but the updates that are already shipped separately. I don't
know how much work Hans puts into bundling the ISOs - but maybe for
people with "inside-knowledge" it's not hard to bundle updated ISOs anyhow?

>  Also, while I'm sure the person doing this is completely good and
> honest,
>  Red Hat's lawyers would probably have to be more careful. 
About declaring Hans' ISOs offical I agree. That's why I was thinking
about maybe bundling offical updated FC4-ISOs? And if not distributed
the official way, maybe it could be done on torrent.


Regards,
 Stefan

[Matthew Miller]

On Sat, Nov 26, 2005 at 02:23:46AM +0100, Stefan Neufeind wrote:
>  I agree about the short lifecycle - I really like that for several
>  fields of use. But the idea of a respin was not about bundling big, new
>  releases - but the updates that are already shipped separately. I don't
>  know how much work Hans puts into bundling the ISOs - but maybe for
>  people with "inside-knowledge" it's not hard to bundle updated ISOs anyhow?
It's not hard, but the quality control and distribution can add up to a
decent amount of work.


-- 
Matthew Miller           mattdm(a)mattdm.org          <http://mattdm.org/>
Boston University Linux      ------>              <http://linux.bu.edu/>

[Warren Togami]

Stefan Neufeind wrote:
>  Hi,
>  
>  I lately remembered the discussion about updated, unofficial FC4-ISOs
>  (aka "respins") and found the URL again on the mailinglist-archive:
>  
>  http://fedora.isphuset.no/
>  
>  Great job Hans did. I wonder if it might be possible to offer them
>  officially? Especially with FC4 some quite important install-problems
>  have been fixed, e.g. due to a more recent kernel. If Redhat does not
>  want to put the burden of additional traffic and disc-space on it's
>  servers and mirrors then maybe it would be possible to officially
>  validate the build distributed by Torrent and offer such a torrent
>  officially?
>  
>  The service Hans offers is really, really great for the community.
>  However I see that for some people it might be a problem of trust
>  (security) to use ISOs from _some_ source. So in case Fedora might see a
>  chance to either bundle respins from time to time and distribute those
>  on torrent officially or validate the integrity of Hans' current ISOs
>  maybe they could declare them official FC4.2?
>   
If someone is going to respin the distro, they should at least fix the 
bug in syslinux that causes the kernel to crash immediately on most 
Pentium4 and higher Intel hardware.  That was probably the biggest 
screwup of the FC4 installer, as the 'garbage' workaround is not obvious 
and people think they simply can't install Fedora.

It is a different matter about making it "official".  I personally think 
we simply don't have time to deal with that and it is the best use of 
Red Hat's resources to work as hard as possible on the next release.  We 
  have barely a month between Test1 and Test2 release by the schedule, 
which is insanely demanding on our workload.

Almost anybody can offer a respin from a bittorrent.  The hard part is 
organizing the community so the right people work together on the right 
problems.  Simply updating the packages should not the primary goal of a 
respin.

Warren Togami
wtogami(a)redhat.com