Per-Product Config file divergence

Mon Mar 10 18:50:23 UTC 2014

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On 03/10/2014 02:31 PM, Toshio Kuratomi wrote:
> 
> On Mar 10, 2014 11:09 AM, "Matthew Miller"
> <mattdm at fedoraproject.org <mailto:mattdm at fedoraproject.org>>
> wrote:
>> 
>> On Mon, Mar 10, 2014 at 10:09:43AM -0700, Toshio Kuratomi wrote:
>>>> What will fedup updates of Fedora 20 look like? Would there
>>>> be a flag, e.g. --product cloud/workstation/server? If not
>>>> specified do we
> fail, or
>>>> is there a default?
>>> The default should be whatever product was installed onto the
>>> system originally.  Going from Fedora 20 to a Product in F21 is
>>> probably a
> one-off
>>> but I'm not sure what that should look like.  I could be
>>> totally
> wrong but
>>> I believe that each of the Products will have their own
>>> install
> image.  With
>>> that in mind, fedup might need a one-off bit of UI to ask which
>>> Product image you want to use.  That image would then set the
>>> Product on the
> disk
>>> accordingly.
>> 
>> I assume that we'll do something that makes it easy to read the
>> existing product from the system -- I like fedora-release + 
>> fedora-release-{workstation,server,cloud} subpackages.
>> 
>> And I think those subpackages probably _should_ conflict, don't
>> you?
>> 
> 
> Depends.  Sgallagh had a desire to mark that a particular system 
> implemented multiple products (ie server that also had workstation 
> installed).  I'm not sure that's a good idea but if we did go that
> route then we'd have to be able to support that with our
> identifiers. Subpackages that conflict wouldn't be flexible enough
> to handle that.
> 

To expand on this:

One of my goals for the Products is that their base installs should be
considered essentially a platform guarantee. If I install Fedora
Server (and /etc/fedora-release-server or some such exists on the
system) it should be a guarantee that some specific set of programming
interfaces and system services are running on that system. The same
for Workstation. (Note: this definition expressly avoids the default
configuration assumptions, since A) we expect them to be occasionally
different and B) by the nature of configuration, they are mutable and
therefore we don't want to treat "configuration changed by the user in
a manner permitted by the software" as "no longer Fedora $PRODUCT".)

My hope here, then, is that in an ideal world, a system whose platform
guarantee provides all of Fedora Server, Fedora Cloud and Fedora
Workstation should be possible. The stealth requirement here is that
installed packages should never conflict between Products.[1]

[1] Fedora Server Roles may end up being a slightly special case, as
we're talking about possibly allowing a Server Role to force its
dependent packages to stay at a particular older version until the
complete set is tested together. But this should be a transient state
and may ultimately be resolved in an alternative packaging manner,
such as Software Collections. Thus, I'll note it here, but hope to
resolve it in a compatible manner.