firstly, we slipped on shipping beta out yesterday, but we hit a couple of issues that needed to be resolved before we could get the iso's out. Most of the things are now fixed and the final bits are building as I write this email.
there is one issue that was raised by Johnny that really does need fixing, perhaps not something for beta-public, but something that does need to get fixed for Final release.
<background> The way things stand right now, anaconda uses yum in c5, so the media now contains a local repository metadata but its not the standard meta data used by yum. Anaconda and pirut need a specific string added in ( the mediaid fluffage, some of the fedora guys will be familiar with ) so that they can use the media at installtime and also be able to use the same media post install to add packages.
The issue is, that this now creates a problem in that you can no longer loop mount the DVD iso under a http/ftp server and just use that as a remote repository to pull packages from using yum. </background>
So now the thing is - for us to facilitate this there are three options.
1. We ship 2 repodata/'s on the media and use one for anaconda and use the other for yum ( ugly fix )
2. We change anaconda to not need that media stuff in the repodata/, and get that from somewhere else ( not gonna happen : too much work, and too much potential to change from upstream in ways not even imaginable )
3. We fix yum to use the media fluff'd repodata/ ( potentially a few lines fix and should just work ). This will allow yum + anaconda, pirut and friends to essentially just use the same repository metadata.
What does everyone else think about this ? I think from this email, my own personal preference is easy to make out.
Also, is this really an issue we even need to worry about ? For me, its an issue since I use loop mounted media right off the block. Does anyone else do the same, or is everyone just coping the tree's out and doing createrepo foo ?