Where is my "everything" gone?

[Olivier Galibert]

On Wed, Apr 12, 2006 at 01:46:10PM -0400, Jesse Keating wrote:
> Thank you for proving my point.  Your everything includes languages,
> another user's everything does not.  So, really, instead of playing
> symatics with what "everything" should mean to every user, we just let
> them select the packages they want and be done with hit.

No, you don't.  If your user wants most things but remove some parts
of it, be it languages or anything else, he can't.  Well, he can, if
he's ready to click his way through all of the lists, sublists and
subsublists and select them one by one.  And he has to be careful to
never unselect the reselect a tree because that resets to the default
sub-selection.

"Select good default" isn't a bad thing, but "Select all" and "Select
none" are needed to avoid frothing users going mad at you.

At this point, installing is a lottery as to whether the applications
you need will be there, because no sane human has the attention span
to check every little submenu.  Install everything was a way to win
this lottery by throwing money, i.e. hard drive space, at it.  You can
always remove things afterwards, you don't need a media or a network
connection for that.  Or, with current hard drive sizes, just leave it
that way and just don't start or configure what you don't need at a
particular point in time.


> We give kickstart the ability to use globs.  Problem solved.

So the only way to do real package selection or ensure that you won't
have to move around with a bag of cds is to drop anaconda and use
kickstart instead.  Interesting.


> Gets even more fun when Extras is involved, or other repos.  Then is it
> everything in the repo, everything in these repos, everything in these
> repos minus languages, so on and so forth.

Stop thinking blindly about "everything", and think about it in terms
of "select all, user can deselect parts afterwards".

  OG.