Fedora Core and Fedora Extras To Merge

Kelson writes to tell us about a Fedora Weekly News article reporting that, beginning with Fedora 7, the distinction between Core and Extras will cease to exist. This development comes out of the Fedora summit held in November. From the article: "Starting with Fedora 7, there is no more Core, and no more Extras; there is only Fedora. One single repository, built in the community on open source tools, assembled into whatever spins the Fedora community desires." Kelson adds: "The post goes on to list three 'spins' they plan to introduce at Fedora 7's April release: server, desktop and KDE. Presumably these would be 1-disc installation sets, with further packages downloaded over the network, rather than the 5-CD collection needed to install Fedora 6."

Comments

I would prefer...

[jd]

...something along the lines of SLS or Slackware, where you have logical collections grouped together spread over as many disks as necessary. That way, you wouldn't need three different install spins - you could have just one - and all packages would be extensions. This has many advantages (fewer CDs for special-purpose uses, each collection can be updated independently, you can handle more permutations of install options, and so on) at the not unreasonable cost of having more CDs if you want absolutely everything.

However, I feel that there are enough packages where the number of permutations of compile-time options is large and where the number of dependencies between package types is unpredictable that the "ideal" would be to have a web interface that let you roll your own set of ISOs online with just the stuff you want with the options that you want. (This is more restrictive than, say, gentoo, but it would be about the same to QA as the current Fedora with less overhead for the admin than Fedora and less install time than gentoo.)