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

[Jeroen van Meeuwen]

On 12/29/2009 12:23 AM, Peter Robinson wrote:
> 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.
> 

As far as the desire of stripping down the bare minimums of what a
livecd contains goes, here's my take on the problem;

If fedora-live-base.ks would just be the bare minimum of packages and
settings and scripts to make a LiveCD as such work (along with it's
features), then there would be no need to strip anything off.

Should there be a set of packages that any desktop/foo/bar oriented spin
requires, well, then enter fedora-live-desktop.ks or fedora-live-foo.ks.

We should always remember though, that even though collaboration on
fedora-live-base.ks is a very beautiful thing, in the end it is about
the spins.

The maintainers should have ultimate control over the contents of the
spin and so if fedora-live-base.ks puts stuff on there we don't need,
then maybe it has to go (even if that means 5 other spins need to add a
package to their list).

Should something be removed from a group however, it's up to us to
forward such to the people maintaining comps.xml (which is all of us).

> 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 :-)
> 

List references to the issue as your dependencies, so that people can
help you track it, and other people can make noise about it at meetings
where show-stoppers for various things are addressed (blocker bugs, etc.).

>>> 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.
> 

We would like to make sure that issues that make or break a LiveCD in
general are fixed in one location only. Maybe that means splitting up
fedora-live-base.ks, maybe there's another way.

-- Jeroen