Fedora.next in 2014 -- Big Picture and Themes

[Colin Walters]

On Fri, 2014-01-24 at 00:12 +0100, Lars Seipel wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 23, 2014 at 05:07:16PM -0500, Josh Boyer wrote:
> > Also possibly correct.  However, that doesn't preclude the repos as we
> > know them today from still existing, with still the same quality.
> 
> Server, desktop or embedded board, in today's Fedora it's all the same,
> just with a different package set installed. People (not all, obviously)
> consider this a good thing. 

Yes, but there are definite downsides to that.  For example:

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=978081

People have been constantly confused by whether "Fedora" does DHCP by
default over the years, because we've flipped it several times.  When we
introduced it for clients/workstations, I consider it to have been a
*massive* win to be able to plug in an ethernet cable and have it Just
Work.

But it's very much the wrong thing to do for traditional servers where
you have 4 or more physical NICs.  (It ironically is back to being the
right default for cloud guests)

It's precisely this sort of thing that we can fix with the "multiple
products" design.  Now, the technical details behind product
implementation matters a lot.  If we're just saying they have different
RPM sets, then it's certainly not hard to put
NetworkManager-config-server in a "Server" comps group.

But what should "minimal" do?

One thing I think is cool about OSTree with respect to this problem
domain - it allows each product to have *different* defaults for /etc
(and /usr).  And when you switch between trees, if you haven't changed
the relevant file in /etc, you get the new default.

Concretely, if you switch from
fedostree/20/x86_64/workstation/gnome/core to
fedostree/20/x86_64/server/docker-io you would *stop* doing DHCP by
default.

Or you will in a few hours after the next rpm-ostree rebuild, since I
just pushed
https://github.com/cgwalters/rpm-ostree/commit/514b73c944e8b07b3a627e50d44c900f7423fb1e
=)