Hi Guys,
Some micro-conversations have taken place around this issue on various
venues and its worth bringing all that together into one place.
With EL6, the rpmlist has grown quite a bit, also there are components
that Red Hat ship out in their 'optional' repo. Which are not available
on the main isos. Or so I've been told - if you can verify that, please do.
The other thing to keep in mind is that we have always merged in all
packages from various variants that upstream ship - making all packages
available to everyone was always the aim.
So traditionally, CentOS has maintained the distro repositories in 2 url's:
[os]
[updates]
with [os] reflecting whats on the isos/; as close to exactly as possible.
With CentOS-6, we might need to reconsider that - there is way too much
content to fit onto a single DVD. And having the main distro on multiple
DVD's might be an option, but is that the best option ?
to expand on that option, we could merge in all packages, built a DVD
iso set ( 2 or 3 disks, whatever is needed ), stick with the [os] and
[updates] repo's on mirror.c.o - and then potentially consider doing
some 'slimmer' options. eg: CentOS-6-Minimal, or CentOS-6-SMB-Server etc.
The other option is to split the repos into
[os]
[updates]
[optional] {1}
[optional-updates] {2}
{1} or use a better / different name
{2} do we even need the second -updates, we could go with what the
present policy w.r.t centosplus/extras is - and drop updates into the
same repo
Then stick with what we have done in the past, use the isos to reflect
whats in [os], create the ability for people to use the [optional] repo
at install time and go with that. The iso content would be dictated by
the merged iso contents from upstream, so we retain the CentOS <= 5
process in that regard.
Continuing on the same idea, one thing that came up was reporpose the
Extras/ repo and use that to host these 'additional/optional' packages.
Given that it changes a massive user expectation - unless there is very
good reasoning to do this, lets try and avoid this.
- KB