fiftydinar commented 5 months ago

Intro

This issue is made in order to track the state of online ISOs implementation in build-container-installer.

There are some users who prefer to have or offer online ISOs for the images, including me, so here is the list of advantages & disadvantages of online ISOs over offline ones that I gathered.

Advantages

User always gets the latest image
Integration with GitHub, including automatic upload to GitHub releases Thanks to the smaller file-size compared to the offline ISOs.
No need to have separate hosting, due to the advantage above

Disadvantages

Requires internet connection during ISO usage
It's not possible to generate live-ISO Users can't experience the system before install when using the ISO.
It's not reliable enough with current Anaconda implementation
- It lacks the option to pause, resume or retry the ISO download.
- It lacks any useful troubleshooting logs in case if error occurred.
- It can fail for some users, even with good internet connection
  (I personally never had the issue with 20Mbps 4G+ADSL internet, but I'm just the exception here).
- It installs the unsigned image, so you need to rebase to the signed image afterwards
  (or use workarounds, like implementing the rebasing mechanism in ublue-update or similar).
- Automatic detection of time, region & keyboard language is not working.

Some of those Anaconda issues are fixed in offline ISOs, like the last 2 ones, so maybe those can be used in online ISOs too.

noelmiller commented 5 months ago

I would recommend against implementing this. The reason we never added it back in when running our fork was because of the amount of issues that would come from users installing from an online ISO.

Until Anaconda is able to implement retries or better logging for online installation, I would never use this tool to create online ISOs even if the feature exists.

JasonN3 commented 5 months ago

What about a %pre script that runs the skopeo copy command right before it tries to install? It can be wrapped with a while or for loop to retry if it fails to download.

noelmiller commented 5 months ago

What about a %pre script that runs the skopeo copy command right before it tries to install? It can be wrapped with a while or for loop to retry if it fails to download.

It has to be better than the current kickstart option that is provided by anaconda. We originally used that and it doesn't have retries. Might be something to consider pushing upstream to them as an actual fix?

JasonN3 commented 5 months ago

What about a %pre script that runs the skopeo copy command right before it tries to install? It can be wrapped with a while or for loop to retry if it fails to download.

It has to be better than the current kickstart option that is provided by anaconda. We originally used that and it doesn't have retries. Might be something to consider pushing upstream to them as an actual fix?

Anything we put in here wouldn't be compatible with Anaconda's code. We could use it to test a concept and possibly even write some python code that could be modified to fit in Anaconda, but nothing would be a straight 1-1 since the goal is to not modify Anaconda wherever possible.

noelmiller commented 5 months ago

What about a %pre script that runs the skopeo copy command right before it tries to install? It can be wrapped with a while or for loop to retry if it fails to download.

It has to be better than the current kickstart option that is provided by anaconda. We originally used that and it doesn't have retries. Might be something to consider pushing upstream to them as an actual fix?

Anything we put in here wouldn't be compatible with Anaconda's code. We could use it to test a concept and possibly even write some python code that could be modified to fit in Anaconda, but nothing would be a straight 1-1 since the goal is to not modify Anaconda wherever possible.

For sure, I suppose I meant more reliable in functionality than anything else.

github-actions[bot] commented 3 months ago

Issue is stale and will be closed in 14 days if there is no further activity

fiftydinar commented 3 months ago

bump

github-actions[bot] commented 1 month ago

Issue is stale and will be closed in 14 days if there is no further activity

oomfiee commented 1 month ago

bump

JasonN3 / build-container-installer

[FR] Support for creating online ISOs #101

Intro

Advantages

Disadvantages