Re: [gentoo-releng] GameCD's and Installation ability

[Kurt Lieber]

On Thu, May 27, 2004 at 12:36:38PM -0400 or thereabouts, John Davis wrote:
> How does gentoopix obviate GRP? One of the installation cases that we
> have to keep in mind is networkless installs.

I don't agree with this assessment.  Gentoo as a whole is almost iron-bound
to some sort of network connection, preferably a fast one. Security
updates, new package upgrades, etc. all require a network connection.  You
can work around this with things like emerge -f, but the same can be said
for networkless installations.  If we're truly concerned with supporting
networkless installations, then I'd suggest looking at something like
Jigdo[1] which will allow us to custom-build ISOs with source tarballs of
necessary packages.  Debian has used this with great success.  Either way,
supporting networkless installations should not be linked to having to
provide binary packages.

The primary (only?) reason for GRP is to offer fast installs.  The primary
(only?) reason to support fast installs is to minimize the amount of
downtime on a user's computer while they're waiting for things to compile.
With Gentoopix (and as soon as someone comes up with a better name, I'll
start using that), you have *zero* downtime.  It's actually less downtime
than with GRP.  You start the Gentoopix CD which presents you with an
X-based environment, replete with browser, email client, file manager, etc.
You start your installation like you do now and, once the compiling starts,
you have a rich, full-featured graphical environment available to you while
you wait.

If we had the user do some partitioning first, we could even allow them to
store stuff (email settings, browser settings, files, whatever) on the HDD
while waiting for their "real" operating system to finish up in the
background.  This would allow the user to fully-configure their email
client and browser settings while the compile was still going and, once it
was done and they booted to their "real" installation, all of their
preferences and settings would be maintained. 

Gentoopix solves all of the same problems that GRP does, but it comes at a
greatly reduced cost.  There are far fewer QA headaches, build time, bugs,
mirror resources, etc required for Gentoopix than for GRP.

This also allows us to have a greater separation between the installation
part of Gentoo and the "main" part of Gentoo.  The install team can work at
their own pace, implementing features that are important to that project
without requiring time or resources from the larger body of Gentoo
developers.  Right now, we have to freeze trees, synchronize on versions of
catalyst, create package lists, debug build problems with GRP sets and a
number of other minor issues that arise as as result of GRP.  Obviously,
there still needs to be close coordination between the two groups, but they
do not have to be linked at the hip in order to coordinate a successful
release.

--kurt

[1] http://atterer.net/jigdo/