Filling the gaps in the spec: media

[Elad Alfassa]

On Sat, Feb 22, 2014 at 12:59 AM, Matthew Garrett <mjg59 at srcf.ucam.org>wrote:

> On Sat, Feb 22, 2014 at 12:55:59AM +0200, Elad Alfassa wrote:
>
> > Sharing a tool would be weird.
> > It will also confuse the users with too many options.
> > If the user just downloaded a tool from fedora, it shouldn't promote Arch
> > or SUSE.
>
> Sharing a tool doesn't prevent branding, it just reduces duplication of
> effort.
>
> And that's fine as long as the tool's executable will be signed and that
it won't show a huge combo-box of distro selection like unetbootin has.

I think that before we call for sharing a tool, we should clearly define
our requirement from such tool, and then check to see if other distros
share the same requirement.
If they do, then yes, we can share the tool. If they don't, we should still
write such tool for Fedora.


I was probably not clear enough in my original message and I apologize for
that, I have nothing against sharing tools to reduce work and duplication,
but I'm against giving our users a tool that will look like unetbootin in a
sense where it has too many options that no new user could ever understand.

I think those are sane requirements for such tool:
1) Multiplatform: OSX, Windows and Linux should all be supported by the
same tool, or at least the UI should look similar enough
2) The tool should be able to reliably download and verify an image, or
verify an already downloaded image,
3) On Windows, we must ship a signed executable for two reasons: the
obvious security reason, and the other one is the less obvious one: The
windows UAC dialog looks less scary for signed executables.
4) The tool should be branded.
5) The tool should not offer downloads of other distributions.
6) As a continuation of 5, the tool should not have any confusing options
or toggles
7) The tool should prevent or make it harder to deploy the image to the
wrong device (ie. your hard drive). Ideally it should show only removable
devices, and list them by name and size.

-- 
-Elad Alfassa.
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