How this bug can come out of its dead-end? Any suggestions?!

[Hedayat Vatankhah]

/*Kevin Kofler <kevin.kofler at chello.at>*/ wrote on 05/09/2010 9:24:04 PM 
+0450:
> Frank Murphy wrote:
>    
>> That *should not* be default for most users,
>> as it will end up breaking quite a lot,
>> if used with other repos. (updates,updates-tesing, 3rd party)
>>
>> as %requires may have changed quite a bit since DVD was released.
>>      
> That shouldn't be a problem as long as updates is enabled.
>
> A more pertinent reason not to enable this by default is that many users
> will misplace the DVD and prefer just downloading the packages. Many of them
> have updates anyway.
>    
For those users, they will receive updated packages from the internet if 
there are any updates. And if there isn't any, yes the packages will be 
installed from DVD. But this doesn't seem to be much inconvenience, and 
also will be the natural thing to happen IMHO. I think the reasons for 
having this enabled by default (while I've never talked about having it 
enabled by default; being able to enable it using the software sources 
selection is much much more convenient than the current workarounds) are 
more acceptable. Anyway, I've never talked about having them enabled by 
default.

> And to really suit users with no or a very slow Internet connection, we'd
> also have to disable updates by default which we definitely DO NOT want.
>    
No. It would suffice if PackageKit disables/discards online repositories 
when there is no network connection and enables them otherwise. 
Interestingly, the latest packagekit in Fedora 13 disables online 
repositories (and print errors) if their connection time out (and so it 
is still usable), but will print errors and stops working if system is 
offline! (it should do the same thing when offline). So, you can have 
the online repositories enabled by default and suit such users at the 
same time.

> As I've already said more than once, IMHO we should just add "broadband
> Internet connection" to Fedora's system requirements, it's effectively
> already required. Sure, you can get it to work without it with some manual
> workarounds, but for Fedora to work properly out of the box, and to get
> updates (including security fixes, critical bugfixes etc.), you need a
> (reasonably fast) Internet connection.
>    
1. Such manual workarounds can be fixed pretty easy; and IMHO they 
should be fixed anyways. Everybody might sometimes be offline, and 
should be able to work reasonably in that cases too (e.g. it is really 
ridiculous to be unable to remove a package from your system when you 
are offline because yum/packagekit cannot update repository metadata!). 
Also I think the ability to install packages from installation media 
(and any removable media containing a repository) is still reasonable 
too (you can get updates as soon as you are online again).

2. Almost all modern OSes provide updates, so do you want to say that a 
user with no or poor internet connection should not use them?!! Also 
notice that most of security fixes are not that important for such users 
anyway! Also, Fedora is not the only Linux distribution who have such 
online repositories; Debian has had them even at the times which 
broadband internet connection was not so common (and this is IMHO why 
its package manager treats such users much better).

Thanks,
Hedayat

>          Kevin Kofler
>
>    
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