[Mageia-discuss] Suggestions for the ISO

[andre999]

Donald Stewart a écrit :
> On 1 November 2010 10:24, Marc Paré<marc at marcpare.com>  wrote:
>    
>> Le 2010-11-01 06:00, Philippe DIDIER a écrit :
>>      
>>>   Always thinking about slow internet connections, or no connection at
>>> all (in Ardèche, in Burkina Faso, in Niger etc...)
>>>
>>> Three months after the last version of Mandriva has appeared, I have
>>> downloaded more than 700 Mo of updates (some updates updating previous
>>> updates)
>>>
>>> If someone installs Mageia with a DVD or CD provided by somebody, he
>>> will get more and more rpms to update as much as time goes on.... (for
>>> instance if Mageia 2011 appears april 2011, I send a DVD to my friend
>>> who installs it on his new computer in september 2011 .... and he will
>>> be asked to update his installed Mageia)
>>> If he cannot download a CD iso because of his connection, he cannot
>>> download 700 Mo of updates !!!
>>>
>>> It might be useful to provide
>>>   "updated" DVD iso or CD iso, some time after the release was provided,
>>> so that those burned DVD or CD can be sent to people with slow internet
>>> connection, freeing them of huge updates to download !!!
>>>
>>> The only solution I have for now with Mandriva  is to keep a copy of
>>> each dowloaded updated rpm in a folder, and to fill a DVD with those
>>> rpms (it is a DVD of updates, not an updated DVD...) and to send it.
>>> My friend copyes those rpms in a specially created folder, and add this
>>> folder as a source in rpmdrake... (not so easy for a newbie) and he can
>>> get an up to date working Mandriva immediately...
>>>
>>> my 2 pence
>>>        
>> Actually, good point.
>>
>> Would there be a better way to do this?
>>
>> It's a shame that Mandriva/Mageia does not add the updates to the official
>> ISO. This would then not be an issue.
>>
>> Perhaps we could ask for this as a feature?
>>
>> Are there any devs on the list who could provide some opinion?
>>
>> Marc
>>      
> Using delta rpms would reduce the size of the updates, or has my lack
> of understanding of delta roms got in the way?
>    

Delta rpms, relative to the latest distro release, are long overdue.
(And not only in the Mandriva world.  Also for Mozilla, OpenOffice, etc.)
Note that for much commercial software, updates are normally delta.
Such updates are often erroneously called patches.
This may be partly a limitation of rpm packages, or more the programs 
that install/update such packages.  If so, it should be a priority to 
correct this lack.

(aside
The latest 3 updates for Mozilla Seamonkey were for security, all in the 
same month, and only a handful of the many thousands of contained files 
were changed.  But it required downloading almost 13 M instead of 
probably less than 100 K.  For a distribution containing thousands of 
such packages, it is understandably worse.
/aside)

However, the idea of update ISOs is good as well.
This could be facilitated by the option of downloading the latest update 
for each package of the release not already present in the download 
destination (and preferably removing outdated updates).
There is already an option for Rpmdrake to not erase downloaded packages.
(Unfortunately one must manually edit a configuration file to select it, 
but that can easily be corrected.)
It also would be useful to have the option to change the download 
destination.
With these changes, creating an update ISO would be only a matter of 
copying the contents of the update directory to an ISO.
Of course, an utility to directly create an update ISO from the 
repository would be useful, but the advantage of the above approach is 
that a moderately limited bandwidth user could download updates as 
produced (that is over an extended period), and produce complete update 
ISOs for others at any time.

my 2 cents :)

- André