Feature proposal: Rebootless Installer

[Douglas McClendon]

Jon Masters wrote:
> On Tue, 2009-07-14 at 02:04 -0600, Douglas McClendon wrote:
> 
>> Can you spare 50 or 100K?  If you can spare 100K/700M in the forthcoming 
>> Fedora-12 LiveCD, I can provide you with a rebootless installation 
>> experience.
>>
>> http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/RebootlessInstaller
>>
>> The short story is that you boot the LiveCD/USB, run the installation, 
>> and then, instead of rebooting into the installed OS, you are already 
>> looking at and using it.
> 
> I think this needs a lot more discussion before it's considered. As
> others have said, rebooting is often necessary with our current modus
> operandi and whether we like it or not, it is consistent. Besides, most
> people don't mind an *expected* reboot after they do a major upgrade.

I quite agree that more discussion is needed as it is considered.  But 
my own biased opinion is that several days to a week and a half of 
flushing out issues here and on the feature talk page, should be 
sufficient to provide fesco members with enough confidence to approve 
this feature.  Again, I emphasize that this is in a way akin to putting 
ext4 in f10.  It was there, but a default user experience wouldn't touch 
the code.  I think there is a justifiable place in fedora 12 for this 
experimental technology.

Please elaborate on the necessary reboots that are part of the 'current 
modus operandi'.  I can think of a few things, but nothing that would 
cause me concern that the feature would have any significant detrimental 
impact on the reception of and satisfaction with F12.  I personally 
think the feature if advertised similarly to one which could lead to 
data corruption on the root filesystem (e.g. ext4 in f10), that it could 
overall be appreciated by some users, and be good press at the same 
time, IMNSHO...

But absolutely, before fesco considers this, I do want all the potential 
gotchas and risks to be thoroughly vetted.  I don't however think at all 
that the risks are such that this is too late a time to seriously 
propose this for F12.

peace...

-dmc