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

[David Huff]

Sorry for the lateness of my reply but I have been slow to catch up on 
my email reading....

I definitely think that other spins could benefit from a more slimmed 
down base.ks definition, specificity thincrust and ovirtnode which are 
doing similar things to what Peter's fedora-mini*.ks sounds like.

On 12/28/2009 06:50 PM, Peter Robinson wrote:
>>> 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.

Agreed, fedora-live-base.ks only included what is needed to produce a 
bare minimal working livecd image.

>>
>> 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).
>
> All of the above sounds reasonable. I have had it on my list for Jan
> already to go through it all and see what can be merged, changed,
> fixed etc (I think I mentioned this to you at FUDCon, but possibly
> not) so with luck most of the issues might just go away. Unfortunately
> December has been manic and it hasn't got high enough on the ToDo list
> yet.
>
>>> 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.).
>
> I need to dig deeper on this one and do more testing and find out what
> the plan is for it from a mainline desktop perspective.
>
>>>>> 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.

I do not know if there is another way, but I have always envisioned 
having another layer below fedora-live-base.  Weather its called 
"fedora-min" whatever, but if fedora-live-base extended this it would 1) 
not break existing spins, and 2)other smaller spins or spins that may 
not even be livecd's can use this minimal ks as a starting point.  This 
was one of the initial ideas behind the AOS.

In upstream ovirt we take it even further and have snippets for 
base-install.ks, base-pkgs.ks, and base-post.ks.

Introducing *all* of this extra abstraction may not be necessary, 
however it would defiantly be nice to have a minimal package set 
definition to produce a small foot print fedora image.

-D