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

[Adam Williamson]

On Fri, 2013-05-17 at 14:25 -0700, Adam Williamson wrote:
> So I'm writing a blog post on this topic ATM, and that really kinda
> brought home how messy this design is at present.

So! I've been poking through the logic of this for the last few days,
still, and with some further testing of exactly what g-i-s and i-s
actually do, and what anaconda and firstboot did in previous releases, I
have an even simpler proposal:

Make anaconda warn if you don't create a user, and nuke initial-setup
for non-OEM installs.

Here is how F18 behaved:

* anaconda only let you create a root password, no user creation
* firstboot ran on graphical installs, not text
* firstboot would let you skip the user creation step, with a warning

So here are all the things you could do with F18 and earlier:

* Do a text install and create user account manually after initial login
if you want one
* Do a graphical install and create a user using firstboot
* Do a graphical install, skip user creation in firstboot, and create
user account manually if you want one

Since F19 has user creation in anaconda, we can actually cover all those
scenarios in anaconda quite easily. Literally all we have to do is make
it pop up a warning if you try to quit the installer without creating a
user account, but let you go ahead if you really want to.

If we do that, then initial-setup is entirely superfluous to
requirements. Anaconda would be able to do everything necessary, and
would be encouraging people down the right path, but those who really
want to do installs with no user account would still be able to.

gnome-initial-setup would still be a different case, as GNOME apparently
really wants to force the creation of a non-root account. So g-i-s will
likely want to go on popping up if a user account was not created during
installation. But that's entirely up to the desktop team what they want
to do, and it's not at all incompatible with this proposal.

So basically, I think we can just do a simple tweak to anaconda and not
bother running initial-setup at all on a 'normal' install. We can of
course keep it around for the OEM case, but that doesn't need to bother
anyone else.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | identi.ca: adamwfedora
http://www.happyassassin.net