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

[Chris Murphy]

On Tue, Jul 7, 2015 at 3:18 AM, Tomas Hozza <thozza at redhat.com> wrote:
>
>
> On 02.07.2015 17:56, Chris Murphy wrote:

>> The Workstation live installer doesn't have any installation options.
>> The UI isn't even present in the installer. It's a single payload, all
>> or nothing. It would have to be done as a group in GNOME Software.
>
> 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 Anaconda in both cases, but the hub UI choices and installation
methods are totally different. Netinstall (and DVD for server) the
main hub shows Installation Source and Software Selection. Those
spokes do not exist with Workstation (live media). In the background
anaconda calls rsync for Workstation live installation, not dnf or
rpm, so RPMs aren't actually installed.

> 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?

Well I think the installer is 90x more complicated than it needs to be
for ordinary mortal users as it is. They don't have the familiarity
with the software or knowledge to know what they should avoid. The
very fact things are easily available through exploration causes
problems.

So I'd say it's both a real issue that lives are installed using rsync
so to then switch to RPM installation afterward adds complexity to the
software installation process both at the backend as well as
additional UI options. The list of installation options on netinstall
and DVD is, well it's out of control again. There must be over 100
possible installation combinations now.

The advantage of network installation is there's a net reduction in
download usage. With live, the user downloads 1.5GB, about 90% of
which gets overwritten with updates after Fedora is about 3+ months
out the door. Where DVD installations I see as pointless since
everything on it is obsolete in short order.

Note: Every product has a netinstaller, which are in effect all the
same except their default package set selection. Then there are the
primary product medias: Cloud has its images, Server has a DVD,
Workstation has live media. And spins are (all? and entirely) based on
live media.

-- 
Chris Murphy