Shotwell 0.5

[Owen Taylor]

On Tue, 2010-03-16 at 02:52 +0530, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
> On 03/16/2010 02:47 AM, Matthias Clasen wrote:
> >
> > I know what comps is, and I have edited the gnome-desktop group to
> > reflect the change for the desktop spin.
> >
> > But as I said earlier, nobody is in charge of designing the DVD install.
> > Just making some undirected changes to comps groups is not a fix for
> > this problem
> >   
> The current DVD image is basically defined by comps and if you edit
> comps, you can control the result and since rel-eng does the compose,
> aren't they responsible for it?  If not, how do we fix it?  We cannot
> just ignore that experience.  The desktop live image despite being the
> default doesn't cover a bunch of use cases (ability to select a
> different package set or even a different filesystem for example) and
> Mo's survey shows that the majority of users continue to download the
> DVD image and while taking the step of moving to a large image and
> offering a better out of box experience solves some of that, it doesn't
> make the proble go away. 

You can take the state of affairs that many people are downloading the
DVD image as saying two different things - first that we need to make
the DVD image experience better, or second that we need to discourage
people from it better.

If you go with the first approach, then you quickly get to the question
of what the DVD image experience is supposed to be.

It woud be great if you didn't touch any knobs, the DVD installer gave
you exactly the same bits as the Desktop live image (but more slowly).
Why should you have to choose between btrfs and a package set that has
been selected with care?

However, to me there seems to be significant hurdles to that vision:

 * There would have to be community-wide buy-in to that idea to
   begin with. That people aren't going to flame when xsane, and
   minicom, and system-config-boot (and so forth and so on) are removed
   from comps and nss-mdns is added.

 * There would have to be community-wide buy-in to the idea that
   the settings that are packaged are the settings that make sense
   for the desktop, and an server install done through the Anaconda GUI
   might have a few settings that need modification.

   How are people (include the openssh package maintainer) going to
   react if sshd packaging is changed to disable the service by default?

With the current situation - if something could either be added to
@gnome-desktop in compos or directly to the live CD kickstart, sure it
makes sense to do it in @gnome-desktop. But nobody is paying close
attention to what you get when you install off the DVD image and nobody
even agrees on what you *should* get.

So, my feeling is that right now if you need a DVD with a somewhat
arbitrarily selected subset of the Fedora packages on it because you
want to kickstart a machine with no network, then download the DVD. And
it's a fine alternative to pre-upgrade if you have limited bandwidth and
your friend has a lot of bandwidth. But you are doing a fresh install of
Fedora on a laptop or desktop computer, there is one right answer - the
live image.

- Owen