Feedback wanted: Fedora Formulas

[Ian Malone]

On 10 January 2013 23:51, Kevin Kofler <kevin.kofler at chello.at> wrote:
> Brendan Jones wrote:
>> The main problem we have with kickstarts at the moment is that there is
>> no way (according to current packaging guidelines) to alter files owned
>> by other packages.
>
> This is just plain impossible anyway (except for config files in /etc), no
> matter what you do (i.e. not just with kickstarts). The next update of the
> package legitimately owning the file will destroy any changes made to the
> file (except if it was marked %config(noreplace), but files outside of /etc
> must not be marked %config nor %config(noreplace) according to our packaging
> guidelines).
>

Of course in trying to do that what we were really trying to do was
amend the defaults users would get on the installed system. Some of
this we were able to achieve through /etc/skel files, but that's a
non-scaling and fragile solution as already mentioned. Some was
originally attempted by modifying firstboot modules (a no-no that is
not in the approved spin).

Since we had planned to try and find better solutions with the spins
and engineering teams once the release was out and since ansible
sounds like it can provide some of them (and since the F18 release is
now final - congratulations to everyone who worked hard through
/that/), here are the Music-creation/Jam spin quirks for a case study:

KDE favourites:
For a spin (or formula) it makes sense that the favourites should
reflect the spin (or formula) focus. The kickstart updates this
through /etc/skel/.kde/share/config/kickoffrc and
/etc/rc.d/init.d/livesys (on the live sytem the installer is a
favourite, so these two are slightly different).

Audio group permissions:
Needed for Jack real-time, usermod commands are added to
/etc/rc.d/init.d/livesys so in the live system the liveuser is in
'jackuser' and 'audio'. We can't push this in the installed system at
the moment. (This is one of the parts that had been done with the
firstboot modules, piggybacking on the add-to-administrator group
function. Additionally to modifying files it shouldn't, that simple
approach is also not very compatible with translations.)

Desktop themeing:
Related to KDE favourites above, though of less functional importance.
Again this is currently handled by having a package for the spin
themes which owns an /etc/skel file that allows us to set the default
themes (KDE desktop theme and splash). This is not really a problem
that desktop spins have (since by definition they have their own
independent themes), but for other spins or formulae being able to
tweak the default look slightly gives some sense of individual
identity for the spin itself and also a degree of user-hinting about
the environment they're using.