> > I wasn't really complaining about having to retry so many times. > > I was saying a [Skip this package] button should be there > > keep on with the install if your CD is a bit damaged. (I > > media check before my install.) > > It's a lot more complicated than that, though, since many > packages depend on others (or even on each other). A "skip > this package" button would have to cause the installer to > recalculate the dependency information with that package I have to agree with the concept of the original post, there are many times when for one reason or the other (even after running a media check on all cd's before starting) a package has been unable to be installed. At least by giving the option of skipping the package (and presenting a list of any packages skipped at the end of the install) it would make it trivial (in most cases) to install that missing package after the fact. If I understand correctly, although the installer calculates the dependancies prior to starting the install, the actual RPM transaction is done with no dependencies so the install of the remaining packages could complete without any dependency errors from rpm. At the very minimum, on a clean install, you may have to start the install process over again. On an upgrade (depending on which packages have already been installed) you may be able to re-start the upgrade, or you may have to restore (from the backup everyone religiously makes prior to doing an upgrade) and then start the upgrade again from scratch. I have done the latter in the past, with a slow CD drive in a slow system... and by the time I was done I had burned 10 or 11 hours into upgrading the system. All because some obscure utility package (in my case it happened to be some archiver, zip, zoo, lha or somesuch) failed to install. Granted, some packages have a far more significant impact on the operation of a system than others, so skipping a package such as the kernel could cause the final installation to fail. At this point you would essentially be no worse off than if you had to abort the install at the failure point. Skipping a package such as zip would have no impact on the system booting, and for that matter would likely have little impact even if the user didn't upgrade it at all, though up2date or yum would likely pick up the required upgrade the first time they were run anyway. I think in the long run a skip option, under *most* circumstances, would save *most* people a considerable amount of time in recovering from an install glitch. Cheers, >>>>> Mike <<<<<
