Dear Jack, I saw in your post that you consider our Installation Numbers to be detestable. Given that we implemented them to make life easier for our mainstream customers I would like to take a few moments to explain them. Let me reassure you that our intent was not sinister.
Installation Numbers are not keys in any sense of the word. A key is used in conjunction with a lock, and as you point out we have not locked anything. It is trivial to decode and construct Installation Numbers, as you have seen. Like all our code, the Installation Number implementation is completely open source. So what are they for? With the version 5 release we coalesced all Red Hat Enterprise Linux server variants on to a single media kit; likewise with the client variants. We did this to reduce the complexity caused by the introduction of virtualization and by the growing number of media kits, something that customers have widely requested. A result of this is that customers need a simple way to extract the components/products to which they have subscribed from the media kit. The Installation Number does this for them. Simply enter the number and everything that you are being offered for installation, you can be sure to get support and bugfixes for. Simple. In the future the Installation Number could be encoded to extract other optional products from the media kit (think JBoss, Directory Server, or even partner products). Additionally it helps the customer to match up subscriptions so that he does not inadvertently use a 24/7 AP subscription against a small, casual development server for example. As Red Hat Enterprise Linux grows into new markets where customers are not going to know, or want to know, the intricacies of package management, a simple number that does the right thing is going to be invaluable. For the techno-savvy user such as yourself, who knows what he wants, and perhaps doesn't mind that he is going to install something for which he is not going to receive support or patches, the Installation Number can simply be ignored. - We made sure that it is easy to be overridden in Kickstart and we put the whole spec into the source. Regarding your suggestion to use check boxes instead of a number: while apparently attractive it would undo the entire value of the Installation Number. The idea is to correctly offer packages that match the customer's subscription, thereby avoiding the need for an ad hoc feature selection process. The risk of wrong selection is just too big and it is easy enough to skip and then add additional packages from RHN if you want so. I hope this clarifies things a little bit. I copied the rhelv5-list as I assume that this is of general interest. Regards, Daniel -- Daniel Riek, Product Manager Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Inc. E-Mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED], http://www.redhat.com/ Key-FP: 3DD7 C376 C3E0 1917 9A63 6343 5A26 2C59 6C07 6F32
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