[Fedora-livecd-list] Periodically remastered LiveCDs?

[Mike Perry]

Thus spake Jeremy Katz (katzj at redhat.com):

> On Fri, 2008-08-29 at 14:11 -0700, Mike Perry wrote:
> > I was wondering if there are any plans or existing unofficial torrents
> > that provide remastered "stable" LiveCD images with all the recent
> > updates applied? For example, I've tried out the FC9 LiveCD and my
> > wireless card would not work until I installed the iso to a USB and
> > upgraded my wpa_supplicant and NetworkManager. From googling around,
> > this seemed like a common problem with the early FC9 installs.
> 
> No -- doing this ends up taking up significant amounts of release
> engineering, testing, etc time.  With only six month cycles, that would
> be even more painful for the n+1 release.  And then there are also
> complications around export control, pressed media, etc

Is it frequently the case that updates will actually break the LiveCD,
but normally work on hundreds of thousands of actual installs? This
seems counter-intuitive. I would have thought that the extensive QA
done for normal Fedora updates should mean they would work right out
of the box on the uniform LiveCD installs.
 
For example, wireless doesn't work for me, nor does the union
filesystem with a ramdisk. If I write more than a few megs to the
unionfs using a ramdisk + cdrom on FC9, I get massive filesystem
corruption and kernel panics (for example, try to yum upgrade a couple
large packages).

It seems like it couldn't hurt for cases like these to have an
"experimental" section of monthly automatically remastered disks with
simply the latest set of updates for the latest stable disc. Then
people could try the latest ones if they experience serious bugs with
the "stable" release images...


> > In general, I've noticed the initial release of many distributions is
> > quite buggy, but that things vastly improve after a couple of months
> > of updates. Is there any reason why remastered updates aren't provided
> > officially? Having a more stable LiveCD will definitely give people a
> > much more favorable opinion of Fedora.
> 
> There are multiple testing releases done prior to release -- the best
> way to help improve the quality of the final releases is actually
> helping to test these pre-releases.  And with the live images, it's easy
> enough and non-destructive, so there really is little reason not to.

Yeah, sure, more testing would help, but it will never eliminate all
the edge cases that only become apparent with actual usage for longer
periods of time and on a wide variety of hardware, ie the ones
discovered by the actually deployed installbase.


-- 
Mike Perry
Mad Computer Scientist
fscked.org evil labs
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