FC4 state of affairs and FC5

[Tyler Larson]

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?
> 
> /Mike
> 
> [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.
> 

I really like the idea of having an auto-generated fedora-updates-latest.iso
available for those of us who (a) install or upgrade a large number of
machines, and (b) don't have our own local mirror.

Even without anaconda integration, it would be extremely helpful to, after
firstboot, do something like "yum -c /media/cdrom/yum.conf update".  The time
and bandwidth saved would be wonderful. It would achieve much of the same
effect as re-spinning a release without the additional complications.

I don't mind writing a script to generate the ISO, but I'm not sure what all
needs to be included. I imagine that it would have to generate a custom
repodata dir filtered to reference only the RPMs that are on the CD (i.e. only
the most recent version of each package). Any advice from someone who
understands this better a bit better than I do?