Criterion revision proposal: KDE default applications

[T.C. Hollingsworth]

On Fri, Dec 13, 2013 at 3:54 AM, Gene Czarcinski <gczarcinski at gmail.com> wrote:
> Indeed!  There are environments/situations where there is no network
> connectivity (at least to the Internet) and never will be.  It is this type
> of situations that will require a DVD.

I run Fedora on a system that exists in on the side of a mountain in
the remote part of the Arizona desert that is lucky to even have
electricity and running water.  No Internet, except tethering on my
smartphone in an area that doesn't even have 3G coverage.  (Internet
access would sort of defeat the usual purpose of me venturing out
there, anyway.  That machine wouldn't even exist period if it were not
used by others; I'd just take my laptop out there or maybe not even
that. ;-)  Trying to run a `yum update` out there would probably take
longer than I usually spend there, and I'm not particularly worried
about security updates, since the only way that system could possibly
be more airgapped would be for it to exist on Mars.  :-p

Anyway, the DVD is _completely_ useless for this system.  Pretty much
every use case I have for this system requires packages from a certain
third-party repository we all know and love, and even if Fedora
contained all the packages I needed for it, they all certainly
wouldn't on the DVD.  Also, I really don't care about 95% of the
packages on the DVD; I certainly don't need six different desktops.
;-)

So instead when I refresh it from time to time, I just anaconda
install onto a USB stick, yum install everything I want to it, then
take it out there and dd it to the hard disk, manually making grub
happy if necessary.  This also allows me to configure it the way I
want before I leave, so when I get out there it only takes me a few
minutes to get it completely updated.

I guess I could craft a kickstart and use livecd-creator instead, but
that seems like more hassle than it's worth.  Plus I keep that USB
stick around so I have something that matches that system exactly at
home, so if I ever decide I want to install some more stuff on it I
can be sure I download all the RPMs necessary for a complete
transaction.  (Supposedly there's some offline download/install
support in PackageKit for that usecase too, but it doesn't seem to be
documented very well.  The only reason I even know it exists is
because hughsie asked on his blog if he could kill it.  ;-)

So if we really care about this usecase, we need to rebirth revisor or
something similar so people can actually make images for their
disconnected systems that have the stuff they want on them easily,
instead of a grab bag of packages most of which they have no use for.
For bonus points, maybe flesh out the offline update support so
there's a sane way to update/install stuff on them afterward.

Keeping the DVD around "because offline systems" is really just
ignoring these users' actual needs.  It would be nice if some
development effort were put to making this actually better, but it's
really an edge case that can already be handled by other, less elegant
solutions like mine, so I really don't blame developers for not
bothering with it.

The only other use case we really have for the install DVD is for
handing out at conferences, etc., and I think the multi-live DVD is a
much better fit for that personally.

> Another situation is where I am installing into a qemu-kvm virtual system.
> Yes, there will be Internet connectivity.  Yes, it is nice to have
> everything updated on install.  But, running with just the DVD image is a
> lot faster (takes much less wall-clock time).

Nowadays we have nice qcow2 images for that use case.  Much better
than the DVD IMHO, especially since a `yum update` is the first thing
I'd do regardless...

-T.C.