Robin Laing wrote:
[snip]
Okay, the ISO's could be created once a month. All the files
are
already on the mirrors so they could create them locally from the updates
already released. At least some of the mirrors could.
That's not how mirroring works. You copy what the main server has, you
don't go creating new things and saying they are the same as the main
server. Creation date and the command line used to build the ISOs both
change the ISO content, so you have no way of verifying the ISOs. The
reason md5sums and sh1sums work now is because a bit-for-bit copy is
transfered from the main server to the mirror.
Don't confuse the issue of creating a "new" package.
All I am saying
is that the present package is just repackaged with the latest releases of
the updates. All the packages have been tested before going into updates.
None of the updated packages have been tested in the context of installing
them via anaconda. This is not the same as doing a "yum update".
To give an example. Lets say that last month, the latest kernel was
2.6.12-1.1456 but this week it is 2.6.13-1.1532.
And this new kernel is completely untested as a boot environment for
Anaconda.
It doesn't take me long to create a DVD ISO using k3b.
You are completely ignoring other, none technical issues.
This is just an idea off of the top of my head. The thing I hear
from
others is about downloading the ISO, burning a DVD and then needing to
spend a few hours waiting for the updates to be downloaded and installed.
The above approach would at least get a fairly recent set
of files with current updates on their computers.
At the expense of time and effort that would be better spent on making the
next release better. Also at the expense of using more bandwidth and
storage space on the mirrors.
--
William Hooper