On Mon, 2015-08-10 at 20:32 +0000, Joe Wulf wrote:
Two concerns:
- I've built, and know many people who still do build, there
system/enterprise disconnected from the internet. Someone else posted about affecting/changing the workflow in order to get the packages needed when offline, so I'd be considerate of just what is pulled, and why.
The collection of packages on the disk has never been particularly well -curated. A lot of it has been on the disk following the "we'll just include this entire comps.xml group just in case it has something someone might want". This is not a particularly good approach because carrying packages on the media implies a level of support that may not realistically be there.
Relying on the DVD to contain everything you might want to install is therefore not a great approach. Installing Fedora Server in a disconnected environment is something that we can't realistically support forever; there's just too much going on that requires network connectivity. A better solution there would be for us to document the simplest ways for an environment to generate and maintain its own local repository of packages that could be drawn from. We have lots of tools for this in Fedora, and making it easier to consume them might be very helpful.
Essentially, the idea would be for someone with network access to run Pungi and construct a network install tree inside your network that contains all the specific packages you would need. Then you would perform a netinstall of Fedora Server pointed at that local repository instead.
The real goal of the Fedora Server media should (in my opinion) be about ensuring that it only contains that which defines "Fedora Server", no more and no less. We're certainly not going to remove that other stuff from the repositories, but I don't feel like it belongs on the install medium.
As an aside, I highly doubt that the current Server DVD has absolutely everything that anyone wants anyway; there must be packages that are already missing and so presumably you have a way to get those packages into the mix already. So I suspect that the biggest impact this will have is that you would need to add more packages to that add-on list.
- The packages that remain on the DVD should be reviewed/updated to
ensure there are no REQUIRES, or the like, for packages that are no longer going to be on the media.
The tools we use to create our media (Pungi, as mentioned above) are designed to handle this automatically; all packages explicitly included on the media will have all of their dependencies pulled in, no matter what.