Atomic Workstation (Was: Re: Call for agenda for Workstation WG meeting 2015-Sept-02)

[Owen Taylor]

On Fri, 2015-09-04 at 14:33 -0400, Paul W. Frields wrote:
> Also, to keep from causing more confusion, I've been calling this
> "rpm-ostree based Workstation."  Atomic Host is kind of its own thing
> and probably a different release cycle than we're interested in.  The
> underlying tech is what we care about as far as Workstation is
> concerned, but not something we necessarily want to push onto
> end-users.

Certainly Fedora Atomic Host and Project Atomic are things of their
own, and the use of term Atomic for the "Atomic Workstation" in neither
coordinated, authorized, nor all that descriptive of what is involved
here. So probably we need to find something else :-)

*However* - I think it's important to realize that the interesting and
hard part of the project here is *not* using rpm-ostree for the base
operating system. Putting Fedora Workstation images into an ostree
could be done today; getting installation and updates to work is a few
weeks to a few months of work but something we could very plausibly
have done for Fedora 24. But what would we have then? Something that
almost nobody would want to use ... certainly not developers. We'd have
taken away the ability to freely mutate the operating system, and
provided any sort of replacement.

Just as Fedora Atomic Host is interesting because of the ability to run
applications on top of the base operating system, making a workstation
run in the same model of an atomically (small a) updated base operating
system requires us to figure out a compelling application development
and deployment story.

For client applications, we need to plan for both development and
deployment on Fedora Workstation, and the plans center around xdg-app.

For server-side applications, Fedora Workstation is the place to
develop and test your applications, but the final deployment
destination is *not* the workstation - so close coordination with other
WGs is necessary.

The name "rpm-ostree based Workstation" is probably useful in avoiding
undue publicity to something that is in the early stages of planning -
but doesn't represent the overall task very well ... it's not going to
be the case that we can have a bullet buried somewhere down on the list
of Fedora XY features "uses rpm-ostree for system updates" - this is a
fundamental change to how developers and other users use their system,
and most of that change is about how applications are developed,
tested, and deployed.

- Owen