[1401] in SIPB_Linux_Development
comment on RedHat-Athena dist...
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Edwin Foo)
Tue Aug 27 08:40:04 1996
To: linux-dev@MIT.EDU
Cc: efoo@MIT.EDU, warlord@MIT.EDU
Date: Tue, 27 Aug 1996 08:38:28 EDT
From: Edwin Foo <efoo@MIT.EDU>
Hello there. I took a look at Derek's alpha version of RedHat-Athena
after reading the announcement in the discuss archive of linux-dev,
and it looks good. There's a couple of questions I have though
before I go ahead and commit to the "upgrade" (as in use Athena RPMS
instead of simply untarrin the packages like previously):
1) Will anyone be willing to track releases of new/updated packages
as they become available and put them into the RPM tree? I ask
because the mirror as we have it is a direct copy off the RedHat
FTP site, which is fine. It's just that there's a whole bunch of
new/updated packages that also sit on the RedHat FTP site that
fix bugs, security holes, etc.
(ftp://ftp.redhat.com/pub/contrib/RPMS &
ftp://ftp.redhat.com/pub/updates-i386).
If anything, I'd like to propose that we mirror those directories
if possible on small-gods. Many of the updated packages in
(...)/updates-i386 in particular fix some fairly serious security
holes/bugs, such as the updated version of RPM (2.1.2 vs. 2.0.2),
Perl 5.003 instead of 5.001, etc. Having access to a local mirror
would help a lot, I think.
Personally, I think it'd be much nicer if people didn't have to
install RedHat 3.0.3, and _then_ upgrade with all these other RPMS.
If they could be folded into the default installation it'd be nice.
But I don't know how RPM installation scripts work, so I won't demand
that this be done.
2) Question for Derek: what kind of approach are you taking towards
the package selection? The default RedHat installation includes a
bunch of packages that already exist on AFS in various lockers (perl,
for example). Do you intend to install only a minimal system and run
everything else off AFS (ala NetBSD), or will we continue to just
kind of install everything but the kitchen sink, and tack on a few
Athena-specific packages? Miminalist installations probably have
benefits in terms of disk space requirements and upgradeability
since there's no need to store everything locally, and only the
AFS copy of a program needs to be updated for all workstations
on campus to get it.
3) Is there a reason why the default cache size for Linux-AFS is 10
megs? I'm just curious; when I was using NetBSD the installation
defaulted to 40, and I think I've gotten much better performance
after increasing my Linux-AFS cache to 40 recently. But then, I
run a "miminalist" system and try to run programs off AFS as much
as possible to save local disk space, so this is just my 2 cents.
4) Has any of this been tested on the RedHat Rembrandt Beta yet?
I'm probably going to try that system pretty soon and install the
RedHat-Athena packages by hand, but I would like to know first if
there are any known incompatbilities.
Otherwise, it looks pretty nice. Congrats, Derek.
-Edwin
