[RULE] "Slinky" for FC3

[Michael Fratoni]

I've made some updates to the "Slinky" installer over the past several 
days. Using the work Franz has done as a starting point, I've:

Created package lists which contain only the base name of the required 
packages (FC3 only, so far) and a script (makepackagelists.sh) to parse 
those files. These will make using updated media easier in the future. 
It should also make moving from version to version of Fedora easier 
going forward. The script takes the package basenames from a file, and 
gets the name of the rpm package from the cd. It's not pretty but does 
seem to work fairly well. Usage is simple:
$ ./makepackagelists.sh -h

Usage: makepackagelists.sh [-n 1] [-a i686] package_names1 
package_names2....
Where 'n' is the number of the disk you are searching,
and a is the architecture of the _target_ machine.

makepackagelists.sh -n 1 -a i686 causes ".disc1" to be appended to 
generated files.
Package lists will be generated for an i686 machine.

The script allows you to start with:
$ cat package_lists/webtools_packages
fetchmail
elinks

And generate:
$ cat package_lists/webtools_packages.disc1
fetchmail-6.2.5-6.i386.rpm
elinks-0.9.2-2.i386.rpm

I've also created packages lists for basic installation groups and 
allowed for their selection during install. (As was the case in the pre 
FC1 days.) Groups possible during installation are currently:
$ ls *disc*
base_packages.disc1    network_packages.disc1   webtools_packages.disc1
base_packages.disc3    openssh_packages.disc1   xorg-x11_packages.disc1
dhcp_packages.disc1    printing_packages.disc1  xorg-x11_packages.disc2
dialup_packages.disc1  rpm_packages.disc1
laptop_packages.disc1  sendmail_packages.disc1

It's possible to install as few as 84 packages (200M) to 147 packages 
(385M) during installation.

I also toyed with the idea of generating the package lists at install 
time. It's possible, but disk space is tight, and the process is CPU 
intensive. Generation of the base_packages.disc1 files takes less than 
30 seconds on my primary machine (Athlon 2600). It takes 8 minutes on 
my tired old test laptop. To me, it isn't worth the performance hit.

I've verified only that the installer boots and installs cleanly 
selecting base only or all available packages on my P100 laptop with 40 
megs of ram. From booting the installer to rebooting after installation 
of all 147 packages took under 30 minutes.

The boot.img, package lists and script are here:
http://www.tuxfan.homeip.net:8080/rule/slinky/slinky-v0.5.0/

As always, comments and feedback are welcome.

-Michael
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