Proposal: Drop most optional packages from Server DVD
For a long time, the Fedora Server Edition has provided a fairly
lightweight default installation, but a fairly heavyweight DVD. This
is because we opted to include a lot of infrastructure-related content
on the disk, such as BIND, FreeIPA, MariaDB and PostgreSQL, among
others.
The reality these days is that this is probably more or less
unnecessary. There's no such thing as a server that is not connected
to a network and since we aren't shipping the entirety of the Fedora
package collection on this disk, inevitably anyone installing from it
is going to need to have access to package mirrors anyway.
So I'd like to propose that we get rid of nearly the entirety of the
<optionlist> section from comps.xml[1][2] and variants-fedora.xml[3].
The result will be a far smaller install DVD, less space wasted on the
mirrors (both for the DVD and the install tree) and very little
difference in user experience.
Arguments against this have historically been that having it all on
one disk is better for network-constrained environments to avoid
downloading content multiple times. Realistically, however, I think
this is generally going to be solved by local mirroring in most
real-world scenarios.
[1] https://pagure.io/fedora-comps/blob/master/f/comps-f30.xml.in
[2] With the exception of the "server-hardware-support" and
"guest-agents" which may be needed for proper installation, depending
on the hardware.
[3] https://pagure.io/pungi-fedora/blob/master/f/variants-fedora.xml