[issue176] cd channel

[Christoph Thiel]

On Sun, 18 Jun 2006, Jeff Johnson wrote:

> > >I just compared 
> > >ftp://opensuse.mirrors.skynet.be/pub/ftp.opensuse.org/opensuse/distribution/SL-10.1/inst-source/content 
> > >to that on the SUSE cd. They are exactly the same. Also Fedora uses 
> > >repodata (rpm-md).
> >
> >rpm-md isn't used on the SUSE CDs or DVDs. It's only used in the ftp 
> >trees.
> 
> Any particularly reason other than no round 'tuits? I'm patiently 
> collecting rpm-md wartlets, there are any number of deficiencies in the 
> representation.

It was done this way, because when we started playing around with rpm-md, 
there wasn't any "distributed media support" in rpm-md and we were facing 
significant performance (mainly because of memory usage) issues with 
rpm-md. The YaST metadata format's main advantage is, that you can easily 
seek through the metadata, which saves a lot of memory (which might be 
very limited at installation time, were you don't have swap yet).

If you are interested in a list of problems that we experienced with 
rpm-md, we should probably take this discussion to the rpm-metadata 
mailinglist and try to agree on some fixes & extensions. (We at Novell 
have already added quite some extensions to rpm-md, which we use for our 
online update repositories. Unfortunately it's still lacking some decent 
documentation.)


> >The CD change problem is an known issue with the yast2 channel support.
> >
> 
> Hmmm, I can describe how the multi-cd swapping problem is solved in 
> anaconda if you wish.

That would be interesting -- I don't know if there is any logic in smart 
to minimize the number of CD changes, and stuff like that.


Regards
	Christoph