This is the README file for the rivendell-install package.

This software comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY.  See the file COPYING for
details.

Rivendell-install is a set of scripts and related files for installing
the Rivendell Radio Automation System on RHEL-derived Linux distributions
(such as RedHat Enterprise Linux, CentOS or Scientific Linux).

Installation instructions can be found in the 'INSTALL' file.

RATIONALE
---------
Rivendell on RHEL-derived distributions has customarily been installed
by means of 'appliances' --i.e. customized versions of the distro's installer
image that contain the necessary additional software and configuration
scripts.  These appliances use 'Kickstart', an embedded utility that allows
installations to be tailored in accordance with a specific set of canned
instructions and configurations.  This approach has proven to be rather
brittle in several respects. The intended use case for Kickstart is that of
deploying a set, static system configuration onto a known hardware platform.
Using it as an 'extension' of the RHEL installer is arguably an abuse of this
intent.  In particular, Kickstart does not cope well when confronted with
target hardware that varies significantly from the original 'prototype' system
for which the Kickstart instructions were originally designed --e.g. those
with significantly different disc capacities.  A particular bugbear in this
regard has been the advent of systems with BIOSes that implement the
Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI); creating a Kickstart
implementation that can reliably deal with both UEFI and traditional MBR
boot setups has proven to be well-nigh impossible.  A second drawback of the
Kickstart approach is maintenance overhead: creation of an updated
appliance (such as when the distro provider releases a new 'point' release
with support for new hardware) is a time consuming, high overhead task
that requires extensive testing of the revised applicance before release.

With all of the above in mind, the scripts in this package take a new approach.
Installation of the base RHEL distribution is now done using the standard
installer images.  Once that base installation is complete, the installer
script is then run, which downloads all necessary packages and performs the
required configuration to turn the 'vanilla' installation into a Rivendell
workstation.  This has two primary benefits over the 'appliance' model: the
script is independent of the particular point release of the target system
(thus largely eliminating maintenance overhead), while downloading the
Rivendell packages from the 'live' online repositories means that whatever
the 'current' Rivendell version is will be the one installed.