[CentOS-devel] EL6 and larger than DVD install media

[Les Mikesell]

On 10/20/2010 5:28 AM, Karanbir Singh wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On 10/20/2010 07:34 AM, Manuel Wolfshant wrote:
>>> To me, it would be more effective (from a space perspective) to align
>>> a little more closely with how RHEL distributes and have a 'core' or>  I second that option. Not to mention that I do not even remember that
>
> There are two major implications from doing this :
>
> 1) we change what is the expected tree / behaviour in CentOS-2.1/3/4/5 -
> in that there is one rolled in product; and people would have come to
> expect that.
>
> 2) Storage and duplicated rpms across isos's : its not that big a deal
> in that we can most likely work around the need to have a lot more
> storage on each mirror / msync machine; but it is a concern.
>
> The big issue is going to be (1), where it could potentially change the
> game for a lot of people. I am not sure if we really want to go down
> that route. There is a hybrid option, in that we have a consolidated
> tree with multiple DVD's for everyone who wants the whole distro; while
> we also create some more role-specific iso spins and maybe bring back
> the server isos[1].
>
> - KB
>
> [1]: given that lots of people have asked or it, I have done some work
> on this and hope to have a 5.5/server.iso for QA in the next few weeks
> with the hope that we can release something like this with 5.6 as an
> additional iso.

What I've always wanted is a very minimal install iso that will get the 
machine to a point where yum works.  And some moderately large number of 
pre-selected lists of packages you could tell yum to install either as 
group names yum knows about or just big lists of package names that 
someone familiar with them thinks would be suitable for some type of 
usage (office workstation, development system, media player, web server, 
etc.), and some tool to grab and maybe edit this list from your minimal 
(non-GUI) base install.

And of course this should work sensibly if you install many systems 
behind a caching proxy without any additional setup.

I think this makes sense because it gets you to a point where you can 
restart and diagnose/fix network problems with the base install, but 
then pulls current packages instead of loading the usually-outdated 
install versions that you are forced to update immediately anyway.  And 
the package groupings could be changed over time and perhaps could 
include things from EPEL or other repos if there is a way for outside 
people to tweak them.

You'd probably still need some alternative full-install isos, but I'd 
expect this to be the preferred choice for anyone with a decent internet 
connection.


-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com