On Thu, Jul 24, 2014, at 02:50 PM, Chris Murphy wrote:
Is the eventual idea that Fedora Atomic will be a separate product, or
will it be a sub-product/variant of Server (or Server and Cloud) that
merely differs in how it gets updated?
There's been no discussion of it being a top level entity.
Where does this leave the Roller Derby project? Does it merge with
Fedora
Atomic, or does it go away, or does it leverage a dnf plug-in approach in
contrast to an rpm-ostree approach?
No one is actively working on Roller Derby at the moment, but one aspect
of it that I still think is important to capture is tooling for
snapshots of *data* in addition to "snapshots" of the OS.
There are definitely cases where one wants to do that in concert. And
also very strong cases for allowing them to be separate.
If a kernel upgrade goes wrong, you very likely don't want to rollback
your mysql database.
But on a major version upgrade, I can see it being very handy to also
snapshot one's data. Data backups though are quite well covered by a
wide array of existing free and proprietary software.
Where does this leave Workstation? Its PRD lists a "Better
upgrade/rollback control" requirement. And its tech spec says
"gnome-software will use PackageKit with the hawkey backend". Since
Server PRD and TC don't have an equivalent to this, it's curious that the
one project explicitly intended to do what the Workstation PRD requires,
is moving under the Server umbrella.
I don't think the rpm-ostree/Atomic model is applicable to general
Workstation use at the current time - not having the ability to add or
remove packages is much less practical for the freeform development
model.
That said, I think it *is* applicable for the specialized Workstation
use case of a replicated "Corporate Standard Build", where each client
machine is supposed to be running the same software. For that though,
the lack of a PackageKit backend is a large gap, though it's of course
possible to script updates.