Summary/Minutes from today's FESCo Meeting (2015-07-01)

[Michael Catanzaro]

On Tue, 2015-07-07 at 11:18 +0200, Tomas Hozza wrote:
> How is the Live installer different from the network installer? Is it
> just some configuration thing, or are those completely different
> installers? It looked like regular Anaconda last time I installed
> Workstation.

It's the regular installer with fewer options (e.g. there is no
possibility for software selection, and almost all of the network
configuration options are removed) and it runs way faster (since it's
just copying an image to disk, not installing individual RPMs).

> I'm just trying to understand if you don't want to give the user the
> option to choose the installation options from live CD on purpose 
> (due
> to user experience or such) or if there is some real issue?

We want the installer to be as simple and easy-to-use as possible. Our
philosophy is that anything that can happen after installation should
happen after installation. The installer takes care of setting up the
operating system, then you can go from there. (Furthermore we don't
expect users to be familiar with the packages offered, and can't really
do quality control on the different package sets.)

There are also some big bonus points for this approach:

* Much faster installation (it takes ~5 minutes for me, not on an SSD)
* Much smaller download size (we can't provide any serious software
selection in 1.5 GB)

For Fedora 24, we've proposed trimming down Anaconda much more, since
most of Anaconda's functionality is redundant with our initial setup
tool that already handles language, keyboard, and timezone selection: h
ttps://listman.redhat.com/archives/anaconda-devel-list/2015
-June/msg00007.html

We do have the alternative network installer for power users who want
to configure software selection at install time. The network installer
is the full-featured Anaconda, and I expect it always will be. But
that's not the download we advertise to users; we relegate it to a
sidebar on the download page. And I think the default set of packages
will probably be a bit different (you might get some packages that
we've blacklisted from our live installer; this used to be a problem,
not sure if it still is).