[Fedora-spins] 2009-12-28 Spins SIG meeting links

[Peter Robinson]

On Mon, Dec 28, 2009 at 11:08 PM, Bruno Wolff III <bruno at wolff.to> wrote:
> On Mon, Dec 28, 2009 at 22:58:23 +0000,
>  Peter Robinson <pbrobinson at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> 1) The reason for the new fedora-mini*.ks files is to slim down the
>> build. The difference between that and using a standard desktop one is
>> about 150 meg on a live CD the last time I tested it and when the
>> Moblin livecd is currently 400 meg that's quite a difference. I've
>> been working to and planning to work further to get the changes merged
>> in upstream. There are a number of bugs filed already and in Jan when
>> I have some more time I'll be following it up with other stuff.
>
> Do you think it might be better to remove more stuff from live-base and
> add it back in to live-desktop where needed? And remove the need for
> a fedora-mini-base.ks? Or perhaps if the mini ks is still desireable,
> to base it over of live-base instead of starting from scratch. This would
> probably help with maintenance down the road.

I think its 6 to one, half a dozen to the other. I think the desire is
still there. By slimming the base and moving it out to the individual
desktop .ks files you could be adding duplication and complexity
unnecessarily there. I think in the short term from the rather big
investigation it will be easier to have a separate one.

Ultimately the work has to be done somewhere. Sometimes by trying to
merge it all together you just end up with more of a mess and creating
more issues and more work for more people than by having two separate
ones and comparing them on occasion. In the not too distant future I
suspect there will be more than just Netbooks. At the very least there
will be a sugar one as its covers a lot of the ground that Moblin
does. There's likely also to be a MID one and support for secondary
arch devices too. There's nothing to say it can't disappear in the
future.

>> 2) The mesa-dri-drivers-experimental is needed for 3D on ATI based
>> cards otherwise the Moblin interace is unusable with those devices (15
>> seconds + to activate a menu) but with luck that should be obsolete
>> for F-13
>
> That's pretty much what we figured, but there should probably be a deadline
> where if the graphics supoort is ready, the official spin gets pushed to
> F14 instead of F13.

Well that would be a question for the X guys not a mere user
environment guy like me :-)

>> other small devices such as scanners, perl, etc. I originally started
>> with a fedora-desktop-base file and had about 4 or 5 pages of -blah so
>> I figured it was going to be easier and neater to start with nothing
>> and then add what I needed. I've had quite a bit of interest in it
>> from various areas.
>
> The issue with that approach is that if some change is made to add a
> feature to live-base it isn't going to get included in the mini ks.
> It might be safer to maintain a long subtraction list.

On the flip side of that argument its quite likely also that a feature
is added that we don't want and we then have to strip it out in other
.ks files adding more work possibly across multiple .ks files or
multiple levels of ks files. I'm not sure what the allergic reaction
to another -base.ks file is that I'm quite happy to maintain and get
rid of if necessary.

Regards,
Peter