FESCo Workstation PRD follow up questions

[Josh Boyer]

On Wed, Jan 29, 2014 at 8:16 AM, Stephen Gallagher <sgallagh at redhat.com> wrote:
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: SHA1
>
> On 01/29/2014 08:08 AM, Alberto Ruiz wrote:
>> On Wed, 2014-01-29 at 04:59 -0500, Christian Schaller wrote:
>>>> 2) What is the actual deliverable and delivery mechanism for
>>>> Workstation?
>>>>
>>>> This is asking how we intend to ship the Workstation product.
>>>> ISO, live USB image, something else?
>>>
>>> There is no plan to change this from what has been the primary
>>> delivery methods of Fedora so far. That said I think the emphasis
>>> will need to change where a USB sticks is the primary medium and
>>> DVDs the secondary.
>>
>> Two notes in this regard:
>>
>> 1) If we are going the USB way (which I think is the way to go as
>> many laptops are removing CD/DVD and we also save some trees in
>> the meantime), we should look at ways to improve the USB creation
>> experience and documetnation wrt to the current state. I would make
>> it a priority to focus on making it specially easy for Windows and
>> Mac OS X users.
>>
>> 2) I would remove the DVD install-only option. Focusing only the
>> installable Live media. The reason for this suggestion is that it
>> would remove the amount of media we have to test and release and
>> that it will reduce that confusing choice for users (if you're new
>> it's hard to figure out which option is best or whether it matters
>> at all).
>>
>
> I'd be very wary of doing this. The big problem with the live install
> option is that it's highly limited in the storage configurations it
> can use. There will certainly be users out there who will want to
> install Fedora Workstation on systems with complicated storage setups.
> The live media probably won't work for them.

How relevant to Workstation is that?  I can see Server wanting to deal
with iSCSI and all kinds of other weird storage technology, but for
Workstation I'm not sure that's the case.

Also, in terms of delivering a stable and "best of class" _product_,
I'm not sure allowing people to tweak their install to have 32
partitions with f2fs as / and /home as btrfs with subvolumes is all
that great.  I'm not saying those things shouldn't be possible, but I
am wondering if the Workstation deliverable is really the place to
have those.

> An option however would be to provide a single USB image that provides
> both the live image and the install-only image, selectable at GRUB
> (defaulting to booting into the live image).

Possibly.

>> It might be worth keeping the DVD somewhere but I wouldn't keep it
>> as a visible way to install the workstation product.

I really dislike the DVD overall.  Particularly when it comes to a
product setup.  Unless the DVD becomes "install Workstation, or
Server, or Cloud" (or some combination thereof), then I see no point
in continuing it as it is today.

josh