On Sat, 5 Jun 2010, Manuel Wolfshant wrote:
in addition to improving docs, it would also be quite cool to pre-populate the questions asked by the netinstaller with same sane defaults.
As far as I have seen while being in #centos, most beginners' questions (in the context of netinstall) were more or less similar to "what should I put in the 'mirror' and 'path' fields ?". Can we patch anaconda so as to prepopulate those two without overloading any particular mirrors (maybe using somehow the output of mirrorlist ) ?
Anaconda is not Debian's netinstall approach, lacking retries, invisible remote archive failovers, and diagnostic logging comprehensible to said newbies. Additionally, Debian avoids much of the mirror skew issue by staging updates to a daily lump, and having much better 'apt-get update' detail coherency as a result.
The next question in #centos from beginner is 'why did my install across the internet fail' and
If they are only willing to D/L one CD, let it be CD 1, and devote effort to grafting in a 'minimal install' option tha has all dependencies at hand [more on this in a mement as to '6]
Otherwise you all are in the business of inventing a robust paralle local media install method beside anaconda
It's been done in upstream derived RPM space -- Greg Kurtzer's 'cinch' for cAos was one, but that tool is suited for a very small class of installs at best
Also, as I read the '6 beta thinking from inside ['notting' as I recall], the single CD size installer is just too small, and CD images are on the way out
I am sure a local limited case installer can be done -- but what does it have to do with ending up with a system based on the upstream?
-- Russ herrold