On Tue, Nov 21, 2023 at 01:34:43PM +0100, Jiri Konecny wrote:
Hello everyone,
We (anaconda team) are considering discontinuation of the Anaconda's Initial
Setup[0] tool, which is not related to Gnome Initial Setup. Here is a list
of the reasons:
* The relationship between the installer and the Initial Setup is very
fragile. It is easy to break the Initial Setup by changes in the installer
or break the installer while we are trying to fix the support for the
Initial Setup. The shared code is complex as a result and it complicates
development and maintenance of both projects.
* As we had higher priority items to work on, the codebase is not in an
ideal state and the upstream repository doesn't even have a proper automated
CI. Fixing all these issues would take a lot of our resources that we would
like to spent on improving the installer instead.
* The Initial Setup tool is unnecessarily complicated. Since it shares code
with the installer, it has to adapt to many limitations and requirements of
the installation environment. It doesn't use the full potential of the
installed system, because the installer can't. It postpones all actions
until the end of the configuration, because the installer has to. It doesn't
offer the best user experience for the first boot configuration, because it
is designed to reuse parts of an installer. It drags Anaconda into the
installed systems.
* There are already alternatives: Gnome Initial Setup, systemd-firstboot,
and preparation for KDE solution of initial setup. So the ecosystem changed
from the time when Initial Setup was introduced. We think that these
alternatives are able to give you a better solution.
Before taking any action, we would like to understand your use-cases to find
out how we can help you to make the transition smoother and also to find out
how much time you would need for migration.
Is Anaconda Initial Setup important for your project or workflow? What
functionality is absolutely necessary for you? Do you use the text mode or
the graphical mode? Are you aware of any alternatives? Is there anything
that would prevent you from migrating to one of the proposed alternatives?
Also please feel free to share this mail to any relevant groups.
[0]:
https://github.com/rhinstaller/initial-setup
Hi,
I can provide a bit of perspective from a downstream distribution of
Fedora - Qubes OS. We use XFCE as the primary desktop environment, and
as far as I'm aware, there is no equivalent of Gnome Initial Setup
there. Furthermore, we have a Qubes-specific initial-setup addon that
finishes installation steps that would be quite complicated to perform
during anaconda stage. Those steps are basically starting a bunch of VMs,
which requires a few system services running (including xenstored,
libvirt daemon and few others) and it's very annoying and fragile to do
that from inside chroot.
So, we do have a use case for Initial Setup.
--
Best Regards,
Marek Marczykowski-Górecki
Invisible Things Lab