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

[Owen Taylor]

On Tue, 2015-09-08 at 14:02 -0600, Chris Murphy wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 8, 2015 at 11:28 AM, Owen Taylor <otaylor at redhat.com> 
> wrote:
> 
> 
> > And on the other hand, it doesn't provide the
> > biggest advantage that we can offer to users: the assurance that 
> > we've
> > actually tested not just individual packages that we're installing 
> > on
> > the system, but the actual same operating system that they are 
> > running.
> 
> Why is this not adequately solvable with the exist repo system by
> adding, e.g.  "validated" and "validated-testing" repos? Then people
> who want the old way still use fedora+updates, testers additional use
> updates-testing; and those who want the new way use fedora+validated
> and testers use validated-testing?

Anything done by simply putting different things in repos can only
address testing of individual packages, not the combination of packages
on a system. There's more discussion in 
https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/desktop/2015-July/012567.html
 and the linked-to Wiki page.

One way I like to think of it, is that I can do all sorts of things to
my Fedora system 

 - without changing package content
 - without breaking 'rpm -Va'

That make it misbehave in minor or major ways. As an OS developer,
that's great flexiblity. As a user - that's not so good - because if
any of those things happen to your system by chance or by poorly tested
upgrade paths, then your system will never recover on its own.

- Owen