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

[Paul W. Frields]

On Tue, Sep 08, 2015 at 12:00:11PM -0400, Owen Taylor wrote:
> 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.

Agreed on all counts.  I was trying to find some shorthand to get away
from the "one piece" model, which as you pointed out isn't that
useful.  Maybe "layered Workstation" is better, or something else.
Anyway, I don't want to get into bikeshedding a term, just point out
we should have some sane way to refer to this finished product.

-- 
Paul W. Frields                                http://paul.frields.org/
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