Services that can start by default policy feedback

Jesse Keating jkeating at redhat.com
Fri Feb 25 17:53:37 UTC 2011


On 2/25/11 9:46 AM, Toshio Kuratomi wrote:
> You've said this many times and it seems that you do it to be
> obstructionist.  The constructive way to deal with this is to start making
> a list of what people really mean by "essential" and then propose alternate
> words to use.
>
> I think, by essential, some people mean:
>
> start the bare minimum so I don't have to start any additional services to:
>
> ... I don't want anything but init and a shell [*]
> ... log into a getty
> ... log in over the network
> ... log into a desktop
> ... do any client-side operations

I think his point is that we could argue endlessly about what is 
"essential", because what's essential to you is different from what is 
essential to Bob, or Jim, or Susie.  This was the same realization that 
led to the removal of the labeled "minimal" install, too many people 
just wanted to argue over the meaning of the term "minimal".

To be constructive here, I think we as a builder of a distribution need 
to decide what it means to have /Fedora/ boot.  What is running when 
something called Fedora is installed and booted.  In the past it has 
been enough stuff to do basically what you've written above, provided 
the right sets of packages were installed.  Some of that was dictated by 
anaconda, not necessarily by the contents of the rpms themselves.

I understand that Fedora is in one hand a big pile of packages that 
users can massage and manipulate into any number of smaller end products 
with various configurations, but Fedora is also supposed to be a useable 
distribution itself, and thus we should define what it means to have 
Fedora boot, and perhaps avoid loaded terms such as "essential".

-- 
Jesse Keating
Fedora -- Freedom² is a feature!
identi.ca: http://identi.ca/jkeating


More information about the devel mailing list