new criterion proposal: core kickstart commands

Kamil Paral kparal at redhat.com
Wed Dec 5 13:22:52 UTC 2012


In the discussion about https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=869978 we agreed that we should have a list of core kickstart commands that should definitely work for a Final release.

All the options are documented here:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Anaconda/Kickstart

I tried to make a core selection. I had the following in mind:
1. Kickstarts are used for automation, therefore the most important commands related to automation must work (manual intervention is not fine).
2. Commands which are easily work-aroundable shouldn't be part of the core selection.
  Example: 'authconfig' kickstart command is just a wrapper around authconfig tool. You can issue the same command in %post and it should do the same. If %post works, it's trivial to work around nonfunctional authconfig kickstart command. The same applies for 'firewall', 'group', 'user' and others, it's trivial to run it in %post.
3. Some commands have plenty of options. We can't really define into the smallest detail which one of them must work and which doesn't have to. In this case a blocker-bug discussion is necessary to weight the importance of the option, its usage volume and the risk involved.


I arrived at three different categories of the core set:

== Setting up installation environment ==
network
updates
keyboard
lang
rootpw

* 'network' and 'updates' are core commands, in same cases you really need them to start the installation.
* 'keyboard' and 'lang' might probably be worked around in %pre, but it might be non-trivial for people. But I'm not firmly decided here.
* 'rootpw' can be worked around in %post, but I consider it pretty basic command to work without problems

== Partitioning the system ==
zerombr
autopart
clearpart
part
bootloader
volgroup
logvol

* Partitioning is pretty major function of the installer and if doesn't work, it's just useless. I consider it core.
* LVM support might be questioned. I decided to put it here, because LVM is the Fedora default and it might be pretty useful in some automated installation. We can discuss it though.
* I haven't included some other partitioning commands, like 'btrfs', 'raid', or 'multipath'. They are useful and pretty, but I don't see them as really core.

== Installation process ==
install
upgrade
repo
%packages
%pre
%post
poweroff
reboot

* 'install' and 'upgrade', because you need to be able to tell installer which mode to use
* 'repo' because you need to set your mirror, or activate/deactive updates-testing, or something like that
* '%packages' because package selection is one the core functions of kickstart
* '%pre' and '%post' because it is often needed for some post-install setups (setting up sshd, creating accounts etc) and also can be used to work around broken commands
* 'poweroff' and 'reboot' because in an automated environment these might be very important for you. Rebooting a computer that is 1000 miles away from you might not be an easy task.


It might be a bit difficult to put this into criteria, I think there is no other way except than list the core commands. We can't say "everything related to partitioning", because then people would argue "btrfs" command is included. Maybe we can create a separate page/subpage related to kickstart core commands and just link to it from the criteria document.

Comments very welcome.


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