New Installer: Extending

Extending and Updating the Running Installation on-the-fly

The installer should follow the principle that all code in the installed system is included in RPMs since RPMs provide metadata, e.g. versioning, checksums, permissions, dependencies, conflicts in addition to safe and clean update and removal.

It is already possible to extend the installation system with new files. See the adddir and extend programs in the installation system. InstExtensionImage.ycp builds upon them and allows to load and unload. This method is used to install e.g. cracklib-dict-full.rpm. Some restriction apply: RPM scripts are not executed.

The wizard registration step could be loaded on demand. Likely only useful if it still requires a browser.

Since rpm2cpio provides no option to exclude docs (like rpm does) it's not possible to save memory by not installing docs. It should be possible to omit complete directories, e.g. /usr/share/doc, by removing them after rpm2cpio but the docs would still be unpacked temporarily in memory.

With DuDs it is also possible to exchange files in the installation system before the installer starts. But in general exchanging files that the installer has already loaded is not possible (in a way that the already running installer is also modified). We are not aware of any system that allows that apart from restarting the installer.