Fedora Core 2 Distribution Size

Manik Surtani manik.surtani at conchango.com
Mon Jan 5 14:37:20 UTC 2004


Hello all.

I downloaded FC1 ISOs via bit torrent.  Something that took me 3 hours
on my ADSL line rather than the 20 or so hours it would have taken me to
download the ISOs off a local mirror.  

Essentially, using a network install (as mentioned here) would be just
as slow as downloading the ISOs from a mirror?  Not a pleasant option,
even with broadband.

The last time I did a network install was with RH5.2 way back when, on
my then cable modem.  Not fun - a basic install took all night to run,
and I've never touched network installs since (off the Internet.  I do
network installs off a LAN frequently).

I hardly know anything of the internal workings of Anaconda, but perhaps
there is a way to do network installs of bittorrent shares?  Now THAT
would be interesting!

Cheers,
Manik





On Mon, 2004-01-05 at 13:52, Stuart Children wrote:

> Maurice F. Piller wrote:
> > Fedora Core 1 came out with 3 iso installation images.  Has the size of the
> > Fedora Core 2 release been determined yet?
> [snip]
> 
> A few comments for the discussion:
> 
> - As has already been mentioned, enough people want different sets of 
> packages to make it impossible to place packages such that the majority 
> only needs 2 CDs.
> - There is the issue with package ordering.
> - Something that hasn't been mentioned: When fedora extras really gets 
> going we're going to have an even bigger problem when it comes to 
> upgrades. Imagine I'm upgrading from Fedora 2 to Fedora 3 and I have 
> many extras packages installed. I download the 2/3 CDs for Fedora 
> *Core*. I start an upgrade... anaconda finds some extras installed that 
> depend on an old version of a package in core which it is about to 
> upgrade. So it removes that extra package. If this happens for many 
> packages it's not good news! Perhaps someone can comment on how likely 
> this scenario is (one would hope that newer packages maintain backwards 
> compatibility, or compat packages are provided... but this is not always 
> the case).
> - Obviously for an initial install you can just ignore extras and add 
> them later. But as soon as you add them you hit the upgrade problem 
> above. A solution is are mentioned below, but this does not really help 
> users without sufficient internet access speed or capacity. What do we 
> do for these users? Will we need to provide CDs of extras?
> 
> Some thoughts on solutions:
> 
> - Increased prominence of network based installs/upgrades. This has been 
> mentioned already. This means people don't need to download 2 CDs worth 
> of data to then only use 300Mb from each.
> - Network installs can also pick up extras repositories (either 
> automatically or allow the user to specify - I would suggest the 
> former). This solves the upgrade problem above.
> - Change how anaconda works (DANGER WILL ROBINSON ;]) so that there is a 
> base set of packages that gives you a barebones system (there has 
> already been discussion about this), and each CD is more like a 
> repository - ala Debian. Users on poor internet connections can get CDs 
> (off friends/whatever) that contain the majority of packages they use, 
> and use network means to fetch any odd ones from CDs they don't have. So 
> if I have lots of packages from CDs "FC1" and "FC2" and "FE1" (Fedora 
> Extras), but only 10 packages off "FC3" and "FE2" I can have the 
> benefits of CDs for most of what I need, but without having to get a 
> full set of them.
> 
> I am not proposing most of this for FC2 (certainly as it seems extras 
> will not be there). However, it is obviously going to need some thinking 
> about. There is a lot more to think about than the above - I only seek 
> to raise awareness that intrusive changes may need to be made, so the 
> sooner it's discussed the better.
> 
> If these issues have already been discussed and either dismissed or 
> solutions found, I would be interested to know what's planned!
> 
> Cheers

-- 
Manik Surtani
Conchango
'Innovative Change in Business'
 
T 44 (0) 1784 222 222
D 44 (0) 1784 221 829
M 44 (0) 7786 702 706
E manik.surtani at conchango.com
http://www.conchango.com
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