On Fri, 2014-02-21 at 17:08 +0100, Phil Knirsch wrote:
Installer is still a hot topic, but thats nothing we could resolve during our meeting and which might have to be brought up with FESCO again.
So, as cmurf has been trying to point out on desktop@ , we (QA) have some concerns in this area too, and I know the installer team is open to the idea of at least simplifying the non-custom partitioning path to some extent.
This is an extremely complex topic area, though, and it may be tricky to get the right things done if multiple teams are considering it in different contexts in different meetings. It would probably be a Very Good Idea to get everyone with an interest - at least anaconda team, the product WGs (except possibly Cloud, depending on whether they intend to use anaconda in their deliverables at all), base WG, and fesco - together in some way to talk about it. devconf would've been great but it already happened. Flock would be great but it's too late. Should we try to set up some kind of special meeting / list / etherpad / wikipage / *something* where we can all talk it over?
To give a bit of background and detail in QA's interest:
First, to ensure everyone actually knows what we're talking about, we tend to talk about two major partitioning 'paths' in anaconda: 'guided' and 'custom'. 'custom' may also be referred to as 'manual'.
In both newUI and oldUI, 'guided' is simply what you get if you don't pick custom partitioning, when you are given the opportunity to do so. In oldUI, you had the screen which gave you about five choices of different partitioning 'approaches' (reformat the entire disk(s), reformat only the Linux partitions, resize existing partitions to create free space, just install into free space, maybe one or two others I forgot). In newUI there's a different workflow after you pick target disks on the Installation Destination spoke which, broadly, accomplishes the same options in a rather different way.
Broadly, QA is interested in doing something similar to what desktop wants to do, for slightly different reasons.
Historically, QA and anaconda more or less agreed on an approach whereby the 'guided' partitioning path would be expected to work extremely reliably: QA would undertake to test every (well, nearly every) route through that path regularly and proactively, and anaconda would undertake to fix the bugs. Custom partitioning was much more of a 'bonus' thing: if it worked, great. QA would test it as much as we had time for, and anaconda would fix as many bugs as they could after fixing higher priority stuff. I went back and looked at the history, and in the earlier days of Fedora, the guided path was consciously designed to be very 'choice free'.
Later in the 'oldUI' days, the path to more complexity in the 'guided' path was opened up by a sort of hack. Some people did not want LVM (after it was made default waaaaay back in FC3 or something), and eventually this demand became so persistent that it was decided to stick a checkbox in the 'guided' partitioning path which let you get a plain ext(3/4) layout instead of an LVM layout. This was always a kind of ugly compromise, it wasn't intended to be a design decision. It was manageable, because a plain ext3/4 layout is a fairly simple thing that isn't likely to break much.
This context was kind of lost in the newUI re-design, and the 'I don't want LVM' checkbox kind of got a promotion. It's not a very good UI, and the point of the newUI stuff was to make the UI better, so instead of this 'special' checkbox, newUI used a dropdown menu - and because we were all ra-ra for btrfs at the time and expecting it to be the default Real Soon Now, and we thought we should make it easy for people to test the thing that was soon going to be the default, it got btrfs added. So in F18 we had a dropdown with "LVM", "ext4" and "btrfs" choices (IIRC).
With the best of intentions, we'd gone from a reluctant exception to the 'no choice' design to a dropdown which included two very different complex choices: LVM and btrfs. So now the installer path which was originally supposed to be minimal-choice, very robust and testable and fixable, had become rather a lot more complex.
By F20 we'd really kind of lost track of the initial intent, so no-one (including QA) really worried much about adding LVM thinp to the drop-down - it's a drop-down! it's for choices! - and now, we've got *four* major choices on the path that was originally supposed to be very dependable and choice-free and testable and maintainable, and of course we wound up shipping one of them entirely broken out of the box.
QA and anaconda have already discussed this and, I think, we came to a tentative agreement that we could look at at least reducing the level of choice in 'non-custom' partitioning, and remembering the original intent we had (which I think both QA and anaconda teams quite like). It may be difficult to entirely drop the selection, but it seems at least reasonable to go back to only having one 'plain partition' choice and one 'LVM' choice (whether it's 'regular' LVM or thinp LVM), and relegating other choices to the 'custom' path.
QA's angle on this is that it's really extremely difficult to develop a plausible set of storage release criteria and validation tests with the current situation. If we map out all the possible paths through the 'non-custom' path it still comes out to something like 80, given the current level of choice, and it's pretty impractical to test 80 different routes at every TC/RC build. Or even at every milestone. So if we don't change the design, QA is effectively forced to test only a reduced subset of the 'non-custom' path choices, whether we *plan* to do that or we pretend we're going to test them all but, inevitably, don't. Yet the installer design doesn't really communicate in any way that some paths through 'non-custom' install are more tested/reliable than others.
Anyhow, that's kind of where we left off back in December or January, and we probably really ought to get around to looking at this again - and, as I said, incorporating the perspectives of the different Product WGs and the question of variant anacondas (whether any of the Products actually wants one, and if so, whether that's actually viable) pretty soon.
From: awilliam@redhat.com Date: 02/21/2014 15:20 Historically, QA and anaconda more or less agreed on an approach whereby the 'guided' partitioning path would be expected to work extremely reliably: QA would undertake to test every (well, nearly every) route through that path regularly and proactively, and anaconda would undertake to fix the bugs. Custom partitioning was much more of a 'bonus' thing: if it worked, great. QA would test it as much as we had time for, and anaconda would fix as many bugs as they could after fixing higher priority stuff. I went back and looked at the history, and in the earlier days of Fedora, the guided path was consciously designed to be very 'choice free'.
That makes a lot of sense, but I'd like to add that when doing custom partitioning, you can easily spend the bulk of your actual interaction time getting the partitioning customized exactly the way you want and when anaconda crashes, it's not much fun to loose that effort. I've had this happen lots and still do. Unfortunately, I can never see the pattern to file a BZ for it. One thing I've generally learned *not to do* is click on something for exploration purposes only. I'm trying to think of a good example, but maybe I want to see what the btrfs layout looks like. Okay, but lets go back and take the default now. Poof!
With the best of intentions, we'd gone from a reluctant exception to the 'no choice' design to a dropdown which included two very different complex choices: LVM and btrfs. So now the installer path which was originally supposed to be minimal-choice, very robust and testable and fixable, had become rather a lot more complex.
Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler. I appreciate your QA angle here. Every condition in a code path leads to exponential growth in testing. However, when I have my admin hat on, I want flexibility. I love LVM for that reason. However, if I'm setting up simple VMs whose backend storage resides in a LV, I have no need or desire for LVM within the VM. It only makes more work if I have to do an in place resize later on. Having LVM on those host makes that resizing oh so much simpler though, especially if additional drives are required.
I feel much the same about the /home partitioning and wish there was an checkbox in anaconda for that. Having a separate /home partition is good practice, but I never use the feature because mine is on NFS, so it makes for lots of click work to get the auto layout, then remove the home. (I did learn accidentally with btrfs I can just ignore it and I've not lost any space on /.)
So yes, simplicity is good, unless it makes everything else harder later.
-- John Florian
On Fri, 2014-02-21 at 16:38 -0500, John.Florian@dart.biz wrote:
With the best of intentions, we'd gone from a reluctant exception to the 'no choice' design to a dropdown which included two very different complex choices: LVM and btrfs. So now the installer path which was originally supposed to be minimal-choice, very robust and testable and fixable, had become rather a lot more complex.
Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.
I don't think that precept applies very well to this area.
The problem is that there are - and this is probably *literal*, not a rhetorical flourish - millions of Special Little Use Cases like yours (the one below, snipped for brevity) out there. *You* want it to be easy to skip /home. *She* wants it to be easy to resize a Slackware install. *That guy* wants to use btrfs. *My cat* likes RAID. It is becoming very, very clear that we just cannot undertake to support them all and guarantee that they are all going to work in a release. It's just _too much work_. Everyone agrees that it would be nice if we could, but then everyone agrees that it'd be nice if I had a solid gold toilet. Some nice things just don't happen. We do not have the resources to be in the business of writing the world's biggest disk configuration tool and guaranteeing that it'll never go wrong, which isn't *quite* what we're currently trying to do, but it's not far from it.
It's worth trying some other installers out, just to reset your expectations. Have you seen the level of flexibility you get from Ubuntu's interactive installer? Windows'? OS X's?
I appreciate your QA angle here. Every condition in a code path leads to exponential growth in testing.
And development. This isn't just a QA problem. We do not have the development resources to commit to all this stuff working reliably every six months.
However, when I have my admin hat on, I want flexibility. I love LVM for that reason. However, if I'm setting up simple VMs whose backend storage resides in a LV, I have no need or desire for LVM within the VM.
Does it hurt you to get it, though? I do my VM installs with LVs. I don't really need them. But nothing explodes, and two hours later I forget all about it. In the end it's just bits. As long as the bits are where they need to be when things need to read them, who *gives* a monkey's tail?
I did recognize that it would be tough sledding to get back to zero choice, and if you ask me to crystal ball it, we might have to wind up back at 'plain partitions or LVM'. But that's still a substantial improvement on where we are right now.
Am 21.02.2014 23:04, schrieb Adam Williamson:
The problem is that there are - and this is probably *literal*, not a rhetorical flourish - millions of Special Little Use Cases like yours (the one below, snipped for brevity) out there. *You* want it to be easy to skip /home. *She* wants it to be easy to resize a Slackware install. *That guy* wants to use btrfs. *My cat* likes RAID. It is becoming very, very clear that we just cannot undertake to support them all and guarantee that they are all going to work in a release. It's just _too much work_. Everyone agrees that it would be nice if we could, but then everyone agrees that it'd be nice if I had a solid gold toilet. Some nice things just don't happen. We do not have the resources to be in the business of writing the world's biggest disk configuration tool and guaranteeing that it'll never go wrong, which isn't *quite* what we're currently trying to do, but it's not far from it
that may all be true but the fact that i was *not* able to assign 4 simpüle vdisks to /boot, / and /data in Anaconda the last time i sued it and gave up after i managed to get /boot and / is not a compliment - RHEL7-Beta1, very recently
i gave up and added the third virtual disk after the setup fine in case of single disks, a show-stopper if you intend RAID partitions
_________________________________________________________
that is also not a compliment
md0 = /boot (RAID1) md1 = / (RAID10) md2 = /data (RAID10)
the plan was to have them *exactly* in that order and not the large RAID10 on /dev/sdX1
that was Fedora 16 or 17
Personalities : [raid1] [raid10] md1 : active raid10 sdd2[2] sdb2[0] sdc2[5] sda2[4] 40956928 blocks super 1.2 512K chunks 2 near-copies [4/4] [UUUU] bitmap: 0/1 pages [0KB], 65536KB chunk
md2 : active raid10 sdd1[2] sdb1[0] sdc1[5] sda1[4] 1904636928 blocks super 1.2 512K chunks 2 near-copies [4/4] [UUUU] bitmap: 0/15 pages [0KB], 65536KB chunk
md0 : active raid1 sda3[4] sdb3[0] sdd3[2] sdc3[5] 511988 blocks super 1.0 [4/4] [UUUU] _________________________________________________________
the same 2011 with Fedora 14, the expected order
Personalities : [raid1] [raid10] md2 : active raid10 sda3[4] sdd3[0] sdc3[5] sdb3[3] 3875222528 blocks super 1.1 512K chunks 2 near-copies [4/4] [UUUU] bitmap: 4/29 pages [16KB], 65536KB chunk
md1 : active raid10 sda2[4] sdd2[0] sdb2[3] sdc2[5] 30716928 blocks super 1.1 512K chunks 2 near-copies [4/4] [UUUU] bitmap: 1/1 pages [4KB], 65536KB chunk
md0 : active raid1 sda1[4] sdb1[3] sdd1[0] sdc1[5] 511988 blocks super 1.0 [4/4] [UUUU] _________________________________________________________
what is *that hard* for Anacodna *not* to shuffle around and add the partitions on each drive exactly in that order i enter them? in that case /boot, / and /data at the end is clear and does not need any additional line of code
Anaconda was +always* the weakest part of Fedora/RHEL if it comes to partitioning but currently it is unbelievable and thanks god that i do not face it regulary by clone VM's and even physical machines with complex setups
From: awilliam@redhat.com Date: 02/21/2014 17:05 Subject: Re: [Base] Fedora Base Design Working Group (2014-02-21) meeting minutes and logs Sent by: devel-bounces@lists.fedoraproject.org
On Fri, 2014-02-21 at 16:38 -0500, John.Florian@dart.biz wrote:
With the best of intentions, we'd gone from a reluctant exception to
the
'no choice' design to a dropdown which included two very different complex choices: LVM and btrfs. So now the installer path which was originally supposed to be minimal-choice, very robust and testable
and
fixable, had become rather a lot more complex.
Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.
I don't think that precept applies very well to this area.
The problem is that there are - and this is probably *literal*, not a rhetorical flourish - millions of Special Little Use Cases like yours (the one below, snipped for brevity) out there. *You* want it to be easy to skip /home. *She* wants it to be easy to resize a Slackware install. *That guy* wants to use btrfs. *My cat* likes RAID. It is becoming very, very clear that we just cannot undertake to support them all and guarantee that they are all going to work in a release. It's just _too much work_. Everyone agrees that it would be nice if we could, but then everyone agrees that it'd be nice if I had a solid gold toilet.
Brr... no thanks. Well okay, I'd take one for the monetary value. :-)
Some nice things just don't happen. We do not have the resources to be in the business of writing the world's biggest disk configuration tool and guaranteeing that it'll never go wrong, which isn't *quite* what we're currently trying to do, but it's not far from it.
It's worth trying some other installers out, just to reset your expectations. Have you seen the level of flexibility you get from Ubuntu's interactive installer? Windows'? OS X's?
Thank God no. I last touched Ubuntu about 7 years ago. The early days of FC were so not the RHL (e.g. 7.3) that I'd loved so much. But then Ubuntu left me lacking in community. I filed so many bugs that never received a single response. The last time I installed Windows it required something like 20 1.4MB floppies (and that was probably the best part of the whole experience). I've only *used* a Mac twice, once with the originals back in the 80s(?) and again in the 90s -- I've never installed any Apple OS. Too damned different for this old dog.
I appreciate your QA angle here. Every condition in a code path leads
to
exponential growth in testing.
And development. This isn't just a QA problem. We do not have the development resources to commit to all this stuff working reliably every six months.
Here's where you lost me. Yes, anaconda is going through a rewrite, but shouldn't all development be incremental improvement. You make it sound like it has to be gutted and redone every release.
IMHO, nothing kills corner cases like polymorphism. Remove the conditions and you remove the dark corners where bugs like to hide.
However, when I have my admin hat on, I want flexibility. I love LVM for that reason. However, if I'm
setting up
simple VMs whose backend storage resides in a LV, I have no need or
desire
for LVM within the VM.
Does it hurt you to get it, though?
Only in the sense you snipped out: resizing w/o LVM is much simpler when disk is virtual, there's just fewer steps. As I stated though, on the host I want/need LVM because in the physical world, LVM makes life way more easier. Yeah, I can live with it in all cases, but then I'm just as likely to do a complete reinstall of the VM as to resize the undersized file system. However, that's only practical because puppet is doing all the dirty work.
Really my whole problem is MY problem though. I just have committed to the time of completely automating kickstart script generation and application. The GUI installer has been kind enough to me that I always seem to have higher priorities (like keeping all my services running atop the latest Fedora).
-- John Florian
On Fri, Feb 21, 2014 at 02:04:54PM -0800, Adam Williamson wrote:
On Fri, 2014-02-21 at 16:38 -0500, John.Florian@dart.biz wrote:
With the best of intentions, we'd gone from a reluctant exception to the 'no choice' design to a dropdown which included two very different complex choices: LVM and btrfs. So now the installer path which was originally supposed to be minimal-choice, very robust and testable and fixable, had become rather a lot more complex.
Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.
I don't think that precept applies very well to this area.
The problem is that there are - and this is probably *literal*, not a rhetorical flourish - millions of Special Little Use Cases like yours (the one below, snipped for brevity) out there. *You* want it to be easy to skip /home. *She* wants it to be easy to resize a Slackware install. *That guy* wants to use btrfs. *My cat* likes RAID. It is becoming very, very clear that we just cannot undertake to support them all and guarantee that they are all going to work in a release. It's just _too much work_. Everyone agrees that it would be nice if we could, but then everyone agrees that it'd be nice if I had a solid gold toilet. Some nice things just don't happen. We do not have the resources to be in the business of writing the world's biggest disk configuration tool and guaranteeing that it'll never go wrong, which isn't *quite* what we're currently trying to do, but it's not far from it.
Don't try to be smart to everyone, it does not work. IMHO all you need is to support one or a very few scenarios (complete scenarios without customization) and a way how to switch from installer to manual partitioning by parted/fdisk/mdadm/mkfs/etc.
The anaconda partitioning UI will never be smart enough for advanced users and it also does not make sense to duplicate effort, we *already have* tools to create all the unusual crazy disk layouts.
Karel
On 26/02/14 10:17, Karel Zak wrote:
Don't try to be smart to everyone, it does not work. IMHO all you need is to support one or a very few scenarios (complete scenarios without customization) and a way how to switch from installer to manual partitioning by parted/fdisk/mdadm/mkfs/etc.
The anaconda partitioning UI will never be smart enough for advanced users and it also does not make sense to duplicate effort, we *already have* tools to create all the unusual crazy disk layouts.
However, the anaconda devs seem to want people not to use other tools:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1066066#c13
On Monday I tried setting up EL7 beta with two physical disks, partitioned identically using gdisk (GPT partition tables) with 3 RAID1 partitions, one for /boot and two as backing for LVM VGs, one for the OS and one for data. I didn't think that was particularly exotic but the installer fell over at the point of setting up the LVM stuff. Given the above bugzilla comment, I didn't see much point in reporting it.
Paul.
On Wed, 2014-02-26 at 11:17 +0100, Karel Zak wrote:
Don't try to be smart to everyone, it does not work. IMHO all you need is to support one or a very few scenarios (complete scenarios without customization) and a way how to switch from installer to manual partitioning by parted/fdisk/mdadm/mkfs/etc.
The anaconda partitioning UI will never be smart enough for advanced users and it also does not make sense to duplicate effort, we *already have* tools to create all the unusual crazy disk layouts.
We don't, really. Well, we do, but it really is "tools" plural, and some of them don't have GUIs at all. blivet and its anaconda GUI really is one of the most advanced partitioning tools in existence. There's no one-stop graphical tool that does everything blivet/anaconda does, AFAIK. gparted can't do anywhere near the LVM, RAID and btrfs stuff that blivet does: it really only does *partitions*.
We've kind of boxed ourselves into a corner of unreasonably high expectations here now, though - we either commit to continuing to support all the functionality custom part currently supports, or we say "reduce it and screw the complainers", but there *will* be complainers. There already are quite vociferous complainers for the very small amount of simplification that was done between oldUI custom part and newUI custom part.
Possibly the most viable long-term option, and I think one the devs are gradually working towards, is to make the blivet GUI an independent component. That would mean it wouldn't kill your whole anaconda run if it crashed (you could just start over and try again), and you could use it from outside of anaconda (say, to pre-partition). And it'd maybe encourage other projects to adopt and contribute to it, which would definitely help take the load off - I've said it before but I'll say it again, it is kinda absurd that we have, what, about the equivalent of 1.5 full-time developers trying to maintain this extremely capable and complex partitioning backend *and* frontend.
It would certainly make life much easier on us if we said 'screw it, disks are hard, let's go shopping' and just outsourced all the partitioning to gparted (like ubiquity does), but it'd definitely be a substantial drop in capability compared to what we have now. (And I doubt it'd be acceptable for RHEL, so in the end the same people would have to work on it anyway even if Fedora wasn't using it.)
On Wed, 2014-02-26 at 11:46 -0800, Adam Williamson wrote:
On Wed, 2014-02-26 at 11:17 +0100, Karel Zak wrote:
Don't try to be smart to everyone, it does not work. IMHO all you need is to support one or a very few scenarios (complete scenarios without customization) and a way how to switch from installer to manual partitioning by parted/fdisk/mdadm/mkfs/etc.
The anaconda partitioning UI will never be smart enough for advanced users and it also does not make sense to duplicate effort, we *already have* tools to create all the unusual crazy disk layouts.
We don't, really. Well, we do, but it really is "tools" plural, and some of them don't have GUIs at all. blivet and its anaconda GUI really is one of the most advanced partitioning tools in existence. There's no one-stop graphical tool that does everything blivet/anaconda does, AFAIK. gparted can't do anywhere near the LVM, RAID and btrfs stuff that blivet does: it really only does *partitions*.
Just to let you know -- a guy from Prague Technical University is working on a bachelor thesis [1] focused on starting the development of a GUI partitioning/LVM/RAID/BTRFS tool based on blivet that should be embedable into other applications, Anaconda included.
We've kind of boxed ourselves into a corner of unreasonably high expectations here now, though - we either commit to continuing to support all the functionality custom part currently supports, or we say "reduce it and screw the complainers", but there *will* be complainers. There already are quite vociferous complainers for the very small amount of simplification that was done between oldUI custom part and newUI custom part.
Possibly the most viable long-term option, and I think one the devs are gradually working towards, is to make the blivet GUI an independent component. That would mean it wouldn't kill your whole anaconda run if it crashed (you could just start over and try again), and you could use it from outside of anaconda (say, to pre-partition). And it'd maybe encourage other projects to adopt and contribute to it, which would definitely help take the load off - I've said it before but I'll say it again, it is kinda absurd that we have, what, about the equivalent of 1.5 full-time developers trying to maintain this extremely capable and complex partitioning backend *and* frontend.
Another "let you know" -- I'm now starting to work on blivet for most of my work hours, so it will hopefully soon be equivalent of 2.5 full-time developers.
Also, we have already discussed splitting out the Custom partitioning GUI into a separate tool with dlehman. I can soon (in March) jump on it and I believe it should be feasible.
On Thu, 2014-02-27 at 09:17 +0100, Vratislav Podzimek wrote:
On Wed, 2014-02-26 at 11:46 -0800, Adam Williamson wrote:
On Wed, 2014-02-26 at 11:17 +0100, Karel Zak wrote:
Don't try to be smart to everyone, it does not work. IMHO all you need is to support one or a very few scenarios (complete scenarios without customization) and a way how to switch from installer to manual partitioning by parted/fdisk/mdadm/mkfs/etc.
The anaconda partitioning UI will never be smart enough for advanced users and it also does not make sense to duplicate effort, we *already have* tools to create all the unusual crazy disk layouts.
We don't, really. Well, we do, but it really is "tools" plural, and some of them don't have GUIs at all. blivet and its anaconda GUI really is one of the most advanced partitioning tools in existence. There's no one-stop graphical tool that does everything blivet/anaconda does, AFAIK. gparted can't do anywhere near the LVM, RAID and btrfs stuff that blivet does: it really only does *partitions*.
Just to let you know -- a guy from Prague Technical University is working on a bachelor thesis [1] focused on starting the development of a GUI partitioning/LVM/RAID/BTRFS tool based on blivet that should be embedable into other applications, Anaconda included.
The omitted link: [1] https://thesis-managementsystem.rhcloud.com/topic/show/180/a-tool-for-storag...
On Feb 21, 2014, at 1:20 PM, Adam Williamson awilliam@redhat.com wrote:
It would probably be a Very Good Idea to get everyone with an interest - at least anaconda team, the product WGs (except possibly Cloud, depending on whether they intend to use anaconda in their deliverables at all), base WG, and fesco - together in some way to talk about it. devconf would've been great but it already happened. Flock would be great but it's too late. Should we try to set up some kind of special meeting / list / etherpad / wikipage / *something* where we can all talk it over?
Yes, please.
Yet the installer design doesn't really communicate in any way that some paths through 'non-custom' install are more tested/reliable than others
Yes. Any many more paths through custom aren't tested, and likewise users don't know this.
Also my original estimate of 80 testable outcomes through Automatic/guided path is for single device. Anaconda permits selection of multiple devices in this path. Therefore it's 160 testable outcomes with 2 devices.
The current four Partition Scheme choices have technical arguments for and against, but ultimately none significantly outweigh any other for the intended audience for this path, and it's non-obvious why the user would pick one versus another.
Option A: Eliminate the Partition Scheme pop-up menu. There is one recommended default.
Option B: Make the pop-up useful with Personas/Workload/Use Case options. Those selections cause a particular recommended layout to be used, layouts that are already tested via the Manual/custom partitioning path anyway because QA knows of certain commonly used layouts that really need to work. And also reduces dependency on custom partitioning
These aren't mutually exclusive, Option A could be implemented in the short term, and Option B later, and even expanded as well tested recommended paths "graduate" to the Guided listing.
and the question of variant anacondas (whether any of the Products actually wants one, and if so, whether that's actually viable) pretty soon.
I agree it needs to be decided soon. I don't have an opinion which way it should go.
Option B above suggests Server and Workstation could have different Use Case options. I don't think it's necessary to have actual separate anacondas. A single anaconda package could permit variants. Depending on how the products are selected by the user:
At download time as unique media: anaconda is launched with a flag e.g. --server or --workstation or --cloud, that causes it to have the appropriate variant behavior.
Within the installer UI: as a spoke within the hub, likewise causes the installer to be varied.
Post-install: doesn't require variation of the installer at all. Treat the installer strictly as a means of getting Fedora booting successfully. Shave the ice, then flavor it.
Chris Murphy
On Fri, Feb 21, 2014 at 12:20:14PM -0800, Adam Williamson wrote:
product WGs (except possibly Cloud, depending on whether they intend to use anaconda in their deliverables at all), base WG, and fesco -
The Cloud plan is to generate images using anaconda. For that case, we don't care about the UI at all, but care very much about Kickstart. So while Cloud shouldn't be excluded from Anaconda concerns _in general_, this specific issue doesn't apply.
----- Original Message -----
On Fri, 2014-02-21 at 17:08 +0100, Phil Knirsch wrote:
Installer is still a hot topic, but thats nothing we could resolve during our meeting and which might have to be brought up with FESCO again.
So, as cmurf has been trying to point out on desktop@ , we (QA) have some concerns in this area too, and I know the installer team is open to the idea of at least simplifying the non-custom partitioning path to some extent.
This is an extremely complex topic area, though, and it may be tricky to get the right things done if multiple teams are considering it in different contexts in different meetings. It would probably be a Very Good Idea to get everyone with an interest - at least anaconda team, the product WGs (except possibly Cloud, depending on whether they intend to use anaconda in their deliverables at all), base WG, and fesco - together in some way to talk about it. devconf would've been great but it already happened. Flock would be great but it's too late. Should we try to set up some kind of special meeting / list / etherpad / wikipage / *something* where we can all talk it over?
Well, the question is if installer changes are short term goals or more long terms and before trying to setup any meeting, it would be nice to collect more data from other groups. So personally, I'd say Flock would be great opportunity to discuss it but on the other hand, it's always nice to be prepared for such conversation. The other groups Tech Spec should be available within a week, then let's try to look for overlapping pieces and I'm definitely volunteer to work on it. Once we have it, it's going to be a good time to discuss details and as Base, we should incorporate it to our Base design.
Jaroslav
On 2014-02-24 06:37, Jaroslav Reznik wrote:
----- Original Message -----
On Fri, 2014-02-21 at 17:08 +0100, Phil Knirsch wrote:
Installer is still a hot topic, but thats nothing we could resolve during our meeting and which might have to be brought up with FESCO again.
So, as cmurf has been trying to point out on desktop@ , we (QA) have some concerns in this area too, and I know the installer team is open to the idea of at least simplifying the non-custom partitioning path to some extent.
This is an extremely complex topic area, though, and it may be tricky to get the right things done if multiple teams are considering it in different contexts in different meetings. It would probably be a Very Good Idea to get everyone with an interest - at least anaconda team, the product WGs (except possibly Cloud, depending on whether they intend to use anaconda in their deliverables at all), base WG, and fesco - together in some way to talk about it. devconf would've been great but it already happened. Flock would be great but it's too late. Should we try to set up some kind of special meeting / list / etherpad / wikipage / *something* where we can all talk it over?
Well, the question is if installer changes are short term goals or more long terms and before trying to setup any meeting, it would be nice to collect more data from other groups. So personally, I'd say Flock would be great opportunity to discuss it but on the other hand, it's always nice to be prepared for such conversation. The other groups Tech Spec should be available within a week, then let's try to look for overlapping pieces and I'm definitely volunteer to work on it. Once we have it, it's going to be a good time to discuss details and as Base, we should incorporate it to our Base design.
We (QA) at least are fairly solidly agreed that we want to push for some simplification of the non-custom ('guided') path for F21, and it makes sense to make changes like that as soon as possible. The question of the product specs is relevant here, so we need to include the WGs as well as anaconda team in the discussion, but it's probably not good to push at least that part out too far.
Chris Murphy and I are going to work on a concrete proposal for this and try to come up with an appropriate place/method for taking it forward with input from all the appropriate parties.
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