Fedora Media Writer

[Pat Kelly]

A suggestion for your consideration: In one of the QA meetings a while back we talked
about how it would be nice if Fedora Media Writer was part of the initial installation. We
use Media Writer a lot during testing and it would be handy if it was there ready to use
instead of having to install it.

[Thomas Gilliard]

+1

> On Aug 6, 2019, at 6:24 AM, Pat Kelly <pmkellly(a)frontier.com&gt; wrote:
> 
> A suggestion for your consideration: In one of the QA meetings a while back we talked
about how it would be nice if Fedora Media Writer was part of the initial installation. We
use Media Writer a lot during testing and it would be handy if it was there ready to use
instead of having to install it.
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[Sumantro Mukherjee]

+1
This will be fantastic and very helpful.

On Tue, Aug 6, 2019 at 8:00 PM Thomas Gilliard <satellitgo(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote:

>  +1
>
>  > On Aug 6, 2019, at 6:24 AM, Pat Kelly <pmkellly(a)frontier.com&gt; wrote:
>  >
>  > A suggestion for your consideration: In one of the QA meetings a while
>  back we talked about how it would be nice if Fedora Media Writer was part
>  of the initial installation. We use Media Writer a lot during testing and
>  it would be handy if it was there ready to use instead of having to install
>  it.
>  > _______________________________________________
>  > desktop mailing list -- desktop(a)lists.fedoraproject.org
>  > To unsubscribe send an email to desktop-leave(a)lists.fedoraproject.org
>  > Fedora Code of Conduct:
>  https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/code-of-conduct/
>  > List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines
>  > List Archives:
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>  

-- 
//sumantro
Fedora QE
TRIED AND PERSONALLY TESTED, ERGO TRUSTED <https://redhat.com/trusted>

[Lukas Ruzicka]

I support this idea, too.

+1

Dne út 6. srp 2019 19:06 uživatel Sumantro Mukherjee <sumukher(a)redhat.com&gt;
napsal:

>  +1
>  This will be fantastic and very helpful.
>
>  On Tue, Aug 6, 2019 at 8:00 PM Thomas Gilliard <satellitgo(a)gmail.com&gt;
>  wrote:
>
> > +1
> >
> > > On Aug 6, 2019, at 6:24 AM, Pat Kelly <pmkellly(a)frontier.com&gt; wrote:
> > >
> > > A suggestion for your consideration: In one of the QA meetings a while
> > back we talked about how it would be nice if Fedora Media Writer was part
> > of the initial installation. We use Media Writer a lot during testing and
> > it would be handy if it was there ready to use instead of having to install
> > it.
> > > _______________________________________________
> > > desktop mailing list -- desktop(a)lists.fedoraproject.org
> > > To unsubscribe send an email to desktop-leave(a)lists.fedoraproject.org
> > > Fedora Code of Conduct:
> > https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/code-of-conduct/
> > > List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines
> > > List Archives:
> > https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/[e-mail]...
> > _______________________________________________
> > desktop mailing list -- desktop(a)lists.fedoraproject.org
> > To unsubscribe send an email to desktop-leave(a)lists.fedoraproject.org
> > Fedora Code of Conduct:
> > https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/code-of-conduct/
> > List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines
> > List Archives:
> > https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/[e-mail]...
> >
>
>
>  --
>  //sumantro
>  Fedora QE
>  TRIED AND PERSONALLY TESTED, ERGO TRUSTED <https://redhat.com/trusted>
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>  desktop mailing list -- desktop(a)lists.fedoraproject.org
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>  List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines
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>

This app really isn't needed on an installed system, though. I don't 
think we should be installing apps just to aid testing.

I'd rather focus on making the "Restore Disk Image..." feature of Disks 
more discoverable. Currently it's not obvious that it can be used to 
write live USBs or other install images.

[Adam Williamson]

On Tue, 2019-08-06 at 13:41 -0500, mcatanzaro(a)gnome.org wrote:
>  This app really isn't needed on an installed system, though.
Sure it is. People use it for installing other systems.

>   I don't 
>  think we should be installing apps just to aid testing. 
That's not the idea.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | XMPP: adamw AT happyassassin . net
http://www.happyassassin.net

[Chris Murphy]

On Tue, Aug 6, 2019 at 7:25 AM Pat Kelly <pmkellly(a)frontier.com&gt; wrote:
>  A suggestion for your consideration: In one of the QA meetings a while back we talked
> about how it would be nice if Fedora Media Writer was part of the initial installation. We
> use Media Writer a lot during testing and it would be handy if it was there ready to use
> instead of having to install it. 
Installing:
 mediawriter                                  x86_64
       4.1.4-1.fc30                             updates
          3.6 M
Installing dependencies:
 qt5-qtquickcontrols                          x86_64
       5.12.4-1.fc30                            updates
          1.0 M

Total download size: 4.6 M
Installed size: 12 M

Download size, if those are xz compressed RPMs, probably approximates
the increase in ISO size for the Live Workstation image.

I've never tested booting a Fedora LiveOS image from a USB stick, and
then trying to create an image with mediawriter while live booted, if
it's able to figure out what to do: i.e. the proper image to write by
default is at /dev/sr0. Otherwise media-writer must download an image,
and right now the lives are short on space for this purpose.

Even this 1GiB bump isn't enough to make it possible to download any
of the ISOs while booted live.
https://pagure.io/fedora-kickstarts/pull-request/556

So the use case necessarily would have to assume an installed Fedora,
not a live boot. And pretty much right after an installed system
starts up and the user logs in, they're going to get a healthy pile of
dnf and packagekit metadata downloaded. It doesn't seem like much of
an advantage to have it already present, whereas on lives, of course
to dnf install you have to download 50MIB's worth of metadata to find
and to any package installation.

In fact, I rather expect if media-writer is already on the media, the
lack of space to download an ISO, which right now causes the overlay
to blow up spectacularly if the free space is busted, would invariably
be a release blocking bug.


-- 
Chris Murphy

[Chris Murphy]

OK on Rawhide, it's quite a bit smaller percentage wise, but still in
the 3-5MiB ballpark guesstimate for ISO increase.

Installing:
 mediawriter                                  x86_64
       4.1.4-3.fc31                             rawhide
          2.1 M
Installing dependencies:
 qt5-qtquickcontrols                          x86_64
       5.12.4-2.fc31                            rawhide
          1.0 M

Transaction Summary
==============================================================================================================================================================
Install  2 Packages

Total download size: 3.1 M
Installed size: 11 M

Booting the Live Workstation image for Rawhide, I start out with

$ df -h
...
/dev/mapper/live-rw  6.4G  5.6G  828M  88% /
...

After dnf installing mediawriter

$ df -h
...
/dev/mapper/live-rw  6.4G  5.7G  670M  90% /
...

Launch mediawriter, click on Fedora Workstation 30, click create live
usb, and yeah it fails with an out of space message. Graceful failure.
(The ext4 file system supports file deletion but the backing
device-mapper based snapshot does not free used extents, and when that
fills up, it blows up - the LiveOS becomes unusuable.)

But I can only delete the ISO so many times before the dm backing
snapshot runs out of space, which isn't actually freed when deleting
files, and eventually it will blow up. And as the application basic
functionality requirement is in the post-install section, in
retrospect it sounds like Fedora Media Writer being effectively
non-functional while LiveOS booted, would not be a release blocking
bug.

Anyway, I'm on the fence. Not much is saved by putting it on the ISO
when it can't practically be used from the ISO.

Chris Murphy

[Frantisek Zatloukal]

Honestly, I don't see a point at all in having Media Writer as app
installed by default. Where is the problem in installing it whenever you
need it? It takes like 1 minute at most (on lowest-end computers I've tried
that).

Also, during validation testing, I am generally creating installation media
from my laptop, not from tested systems, so it wouldn't save me any time
anyway.