anaconda / initial-setup / gnome-initial-setup: can we do this better?

[Adam Williamson]

So I'm writing a blog post on this topic ATM, and that really kinda
brought home how messy this design is at present.

Quick refresher for anyone who hasn't looked at it much yet: in F19,
anaconda can create user accounts, and 'firstboot' has been replaced
with two alternative tools, 'initial-setup' which is used in any
graphical install other than a GNOME install and just replicates
anaconda's 'root password', 'user creation' and 'date/time' spokes, and
gnome-initial-setup, which is used in GNOME installs and is its own
whole thing that can also do user creation.

I mapped out all the potential paths through this maze, and got this -
16(!!!) paths:

anaconda: root pw, no user - g-i-s: admin user
                             i-s: admin user
                             i-s: regular user
                             console: root

anaconda: root pw, regular user - g-i-s: user mode
                                  i-s: edit root pw or user
                                  i-s: leave intact
                                  console: regular user + root

anaconda: root pw, admin user - g-i-s: user mode
                                i-s: edit root pw or user
                                i-s: leave intact
                                console: admin user + root

anaconda: no root pw, admin user - g-i-s: user mode
                                i-s: edit root pw or user
                                i-s: leave intact
                                console: admin user + root

Note the paths marked "i-s: edit root pw or user" are pretty messy and
open ended in themselves - initial-setup always runs if installed, no
matter what you set in anaconda, and at least theoretically lets you
change the settings you picked in anaconda.

This is...kinda nuts, and a QA nightmare. Can we maybe take a step back
and look if there's a more sensible way to design this, ideally with the
GNOME and anaconda teams working together?

If we imagined initial-setup didn't exist and we only had the
anaconda/g-i-s case, the proliferation of trees at least looks rather
better, because g-i-s can't set the root password or change what
anaconda did; if you create a user account during anaconda, g-i-s runs
only after you log in with that user account and just lets you configure
various settings for that user account, it doesn't let you create other
user accounts (this is what I've labelled as 'g-i-s: user mode' in the
tree). So the anaconda/g-i-s paths are broadly sane already. It's the
anaconda/i-s paths that are really complicating things. Still, it might
help to just take a step back and decide if we really need all this
flexibility. We could, for instance, simply force user creation during
anaconda, dump initial-setup entirely, and use only
gnome-initial-setup's "user mode" (desktops other than GNOME could
implement something like this "user mode" if they wanted to, or not).
That would be a hell of a lot simpler to code, test, support and
explain, with the minor(?) drawback that you couldn't install without a
user account and then create it on first boot any more. Xkcd Law tells
us that someone will not be happy about this:

https://xkcd.com/1172/

but still, it seems to be worth considering. Alternatively, we could
make i-s behave a lot more like g-i-s: it could dump its 'root password'
and 'date/time' spokes, and only run at all, and only to allow user
creation, if you didn't create a user during anaconda.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | identi.ca: adamwfedora
http://www.happyassassin.net