At 04:08 PM 5/20/2007, Alan Cox wrote:
<AC>>>>>Everything would be all of FC7 (the seperate extras is gone).<<<<<
Good evening, Alan.
That's what I read, and yet the Fedora 7 Test 4 DVD ISO is smaller than the
FC6 DVD ISO which doesn't include the extras.
Do the F7 Test releases just include the base stuff, and are they planning
on adding the extras for the public release? If so, will there be a test
release with all the extras that people can bang on prior to the public
release?
<AC>>>>>It would haul in a zillion weird and wonderful obscure apps, some
very large, and it would cause problems with conflicts between "either/or"
package choices.<<<<<
I am acutely aware that F7, like most distros, is free, and believe me
nobody appreciates the hard work that the Fedora people do more than
me. Having said that, I have to wonder if the installer shouldn't be smart
enough to guard the user against these kinds of "either/or" conflicts...
and I have to further wonder if Linux will ever gain the mainstream
acceptance its adherents so devoutly wish for, if it is so easy to wedge an
installation by simply selecting too many things.
I can certainly understand that there will be certain things (drivers and
modules) that should not or cannot be run concurrently, and one would
expect whatever applications that need the drivers and modules to load them
and not any others. I have trouble understanding why the very fact that
some conflicting thing is present on the disk is enough to cause a
conflict, even if it doesn't get loaded. I suppose there could be some
modules with overloaded function names so that an application ends up
calling the wrong module function, and all I can say is "don't do that...".
I have been using Linux off and on since back in the mid 1990's, around the
day of the 0.9x kernels, and I still don't know enough to be able to always
figure out exactly what I need for this or that. Every time I tried to do
something that was at all out of the mainstream, I kept running into
problems with this or that being missing, with no clear means to understand
exactly how I go about installing only what I need and no more. Hence,
since back around FC2 or so, I have just defaulted to installing
everything, and so far that approach has worked out well (although I
installed only what was on the install ISOs, not the extras or SPRMS).
<AC>>>>>Selecting all the groups offered is intended to be a sane "all the
stuff you are likely to want" option, that fits in actual normal
disk/time.<<<<<
I actually ran into some big problems from doing that, back in the days
(not so very long ago) when I didn't know that just checking all the
packages wasn't enough... you had to go into each package and select the
options you want (making the incredibly rash assumption that I had any idea
which options I wanted / needed), or just right click on each package and
select "all" (I only found out about the right-click option about six
months ago). I had to set up a Subversion repository and wanted to make it
accessible from the web, but there was stuff missing from the Apache
installation that would have been installed if I had known about it when I
installed Fedora. I tried adding things individually but I never did get
it all to work, and finally had to give up on the webdav protocol for
accessing Subversion and settle for the svn+ssh protocol which isn't web-based.
Since then I have just done the "right click and select all" operation for
each individual package, and as I said that has worked out well... so
far. That seems to have changed with F7... but that's another topic for
another message to post here.
Eric Poole
Burgoyne, Nolet & Poole, Inc.
Londonderry, NH
www.bnpconsulting.com
