FC4 state of affairs and FC5

[Jeremy Katz]

On Wed, 2005-09-07 at 13:06 -0400, Michael Wiktowy wrote:
> Paul A Houle wrote:
> >    It would be nice if someone respun Fedora with the latest rpms
> > every month,  every week,  whatever.  It's probably not that hard to
> > do -- I guess it's just a matter of setting up your directories for
> > spinning a distribution,  and putting in the latest RPM directory from
> > the mirror sites,  right?  And,  of course,  testing it to make sure
> > that it all works through firstboot.
> 
> Aren't many of the problems that this is designed to circumvent going to
> be solved with anaconda becoming aware of extras and updates during install?
> You still have the issue of having to download the updates.  Maybe yum
> could get a bit smarter [1] about CD-based repos and people who don't
> have net access on all the boxes that they manage can make their own
> update-repo-on-a-CD.
> 
> ... or am I mistaken about the scope of the anaconda changes coming for FC5?

Well, for FC5, exactly how much will be realized is probably not all of
it.  Given the variety of things which _could_ break, not all of it
makes sense to expose in the UI the first time around.  So we'll
probably just have basically the same sort of functionality and only
maybe have some hidden ways to enable more :)

In any case, it won't help the cases where
a) the installer kernel doesn't work for your hardware
b) some other part of the installer images has a bug for your situation.
c) other things that aren't on the top of my head right now.

> [1] AFAIK, you can make a repo on a CD by making a .repo file that
> points to the url file:///media/cd[recorder,rom] but having repos that
> span CDs and having yum fail gracefully on a absent repo CD would be
> where things need some work.

Yes, having the metadata understand cds is one of the undertakings for
getting anaconda to use yum.  

Jeremy