[packagekit] ServicePack: The magic file

[Richard Hughes]

On Fri, 2008-03-28 at 13:03 +0100, Jan Niklas Hasse wrote:
> I'm new to the mailing list, i hope it's okay if I ask something. (And
> I hope my English is okay)

Yes, of course, welcome. You're English is waaay better than any of my
foreign languages :-)

> Why do you need to Lock() the CDROM drive? All packages would be
> copied to a temporary folder before installing, wouldn't they?

Well, most people don't want to copy 400Mb-1Gb of files when they could
be installed off the media; copying files takes time and some people
don't have the spare disk space for that.

> Is it necessary to add the repo? I thought a ServicePack are a couple
> of packages which need to be installed once.

Well, in Windows a service pack is indeed a single large file, but in
Linux we don't need to (or want to) package the small compressed files
into one larger file as we can't then install or update them
individually.

I hope that helps,

Richard