Proposal to WGs and rel-eng: Move 90-default.preset from systemd to fedora-release

[Adam Williamson]

On 2014-02-14 09:25, Matthew Miller wrote:
> On Fri, Feb 14, 2014 at 04:02:47PM +0100, Kevin Kofler wrote:
>> > That seems reasonable, and in that case, something like "fedora-presets"
>> > and "fedora-workstation-presets", etc., seems appropriate, and the
>> > corresponding release package could pull them in.
>> What about my proposal to drop the preset directly onto the file 
>> system (but
>> in /etc rather than in /usr/share as we do now) in the live 
>> kickstarts?
>> After all, a file in /etc doesn't really need to be owned by some 
>> package.
>> (Having it unowned also means sysadmins can easily customize it by 
>> editing
>> it directly, as opposed to creating their own file in /etc.)
> 
> I think in most caess, it's actually _nicer_ to create your own 
> overrides
> file rather than editing a big monolith one, bceause with the 
> monolithic
> approach you have to deal with merging changes in areas you didn't care
> about.
> 
> I'm also not in favor of adding _more_ "canonical voodoo" to kickstart 
> files
> -- that is, stuff which is effectively mandatory in every %post 
> section.

Very much +1. Putting it in kickstarts is a worse tying problem than 
putting it in a package: it ties this configuration mechanism to a 
system for creating deliverables, which is what kickstart is. We need to 
be moving away from having configuration in kickstarts, not adding more.

Blue sky thinking aside, keeping a reasonably static, distro-independent 
set of defaults in systemd and then two layers of Fedora overlays (one 
project-wide, one per-Product or per-product) in packages seems 
obviously the right design to me. I agree with Dennis that 
fedora-release is not necessarily the place for this; apart from the 
points he raised, these don't seem to be a part of 'defining the 
release' in any case, and the number of people who can commit to 
fedora-release's upstream is fairly limited (and may be required to stay 
that way).

To me, putting this kind of thing in a config-only package is a nice 
approach, because if we ever do build the free-floating configuration 
layer Colin suggests - not tied to the deliverable-creation layer or the 
file-deployment layer - it should make migration fairly easy. Having 
this kind of configuration in mixed packages or in kickstarts would seem 
to make the migration trickier.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | XMPP: adamw AT happyassassin . net
http://www.happyassassin.net