[CentOS-devel] Centos server installation

[夜神 岩男]

On 08/03/2011 01:01 AM, Les Mikesell wrote:
> On 8/2/2011 10:28 AM, 夜神　岩男 wrote:
>>
>>> I am assuming that he means to suggest a button to "select all" in a group.
>>> Right now on certain groups when you select them for installation will
>>> only install for example 11/93,
>>> I think he means to add a button that allows him to add the other 82 in
>>> a single click.
>>
>> We had this discussion in Fedora-land a while back. There are pretty
>> solid reasons why this was removed in Fedora and later RHEL as an option
>> (the FESCo logs of it are around somewhere, as are a few blogs detailing
>> this after the fact).
>>
>> Installing *everything* is not normal use and can cause weird things to
>> happen (depending on use -- for example when alternatives install next
>> to or over defaults and admins often don't realize this is happening,
>> particularly with sendmail/postfix or 389-DS/OpenLDAP).
>
> It would be nice if someone who chose the available packages and has at
> least some understanding of them would also provide an 'everything'
> choice that is a set of all the package that won't cause weird things to
> happen.  Disk space is cheap and it is much easier to explore/test
> programs when they are installed than by reading the itty-bitty blurb
> that 'yum info' gives.  Was there anyone in the fedora-land discussion
> who thought an end user would really be able to select packages
> sight-unseen better than the people who made the choice of packages to
> be included in the distro?
>
>> ...and for people who *really* want to do this, 'yum install"*"' works
>> just fine and lets you know a lot more than Anaconda does. The quotes
>> around the * are necessary. This can be placed in a kickstart script or
>> a firstrun hack but neither tier of upstream consider it a good idea to
>> tempt the average person installing a system with such a nuclear option
>> before they've even seen the system defaults working the way they were
>> designed...
>>
>> Anyway, wouldn't this break "binary compatibility with upstream"?
>
> Agreed - it is something that upstream should provide too.  Or at least
> a yum group or list of packages in a form that yum would understand to
> install them later.

This was discussed, exactly the way you are stating things on one side 
"wouldn't it be nice if..." VS "the uninformed are the majority who 
choose the 'everything' option and when things break they assume the 
whole distro sucks and ditch it" on the other.

Which would you prefer be the newcomer impression of CentOS? A system 
that works well with adequate defaults but that can be explored to the 
heart's content (which entails research -- on any OS -- how many people 
do "everything" AIX installs -- they either don't do them or receive AIX 
package selections that are strict defaults with nothing further 
vendor-provided?) or one that gets overloaded with conflicts and breaks 
because too many conflicts are installed and things that are supposed to 
be simple, like starting or stopping slapd, become complex in ways 
unknowable to the user?

In short:

The chance that a knowledgable system administrator is going to be able 
to research how packages interact in a desired setup...

...is a lot higher than...

...the chances that the average person who is prone to click 
"everything" will know how to manage the situation he's put himself in.

This *was* a feature in the past and was removed for a reason. You can 
head back to FESCo and re-argue it, but I found the case for removal 
compelling, particularly with the 'yum install "*"' option available for 
those who know what they are doing -- and that begins with understanding 
why the "s are necessary in the command.

This was a revealing threshold, as it turned out once the feature was 
removed -- most of the complaints/questions on the users at fp.o list about 
removal were from people who really didn't know what quotes do in 
bash... which sort of validated the whole debate in favor of removal 
after the fact. This was the precise demographic that had no business 
clicking "everything" and was the only group clamoring for the 
reinstatement of @everything.

As far as package preselects or package groups that are known to work 
well together, Anaconda is replete with them. A cut down of an 
@everything option winds up being a lot closer to a spin than an 
installation option, and that is where those things have drifted to 
(Well, more in Fedora land than CentOS land. Most CentOS folks tend to 
just use the distro and not develop spins.).

There is history behind this decision. Of course, CentOS is not 
upstream, so it could go its own way, but I think thoughtful 
contemplation of the issue at hand (making a dangerous edgecase widely 
available on an enterprise-level system) they will likely stick with the 
status quo.

-Iwao