Is the Fedora Server one product?

[Stephen Gallagher]

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On 11/01/2013 09:15 AM, Miloslav Trmač wrote:
> On Fri, Nov 1, 2013 at 11:08 AM, "Jóhann B. Guðmundsson" 
> <johannbg at gmail.com> wrote:
>> "Fedora Server WG where we discover product solutions that work
>> well for our users, our administrators, our developers and our
>> project." --> T-shirt anyone <-- ;)
>> 
>> We should be identifying which server applications work well on
>> their own or work well with each other out of those 500+ we have
>> ( think of them as ingredients ).
>> 
>> Once we have done that we add a Fedora secret sauce ( what we
>> feel they are lacking for the 21 century which for example could
>> be that missing configuration api ) and form a PRD for that
>> recipe and implement it.
> 
> I agree with the focus on "product solutions" and the
> end-user-visible goal.
> 
> 
> From an implementation point of view, I don't think creating many 
> individual "recipes" is optimal.
> 


Well, I think this may depend on how we define such recipes. I think
there's certainly value in defining a sert of roles (possibly stolen
directly from the Evil Empire) that we can provide as a
standard-and-recommended approach to certain problem spaces.

For example, while Fedora will likely always provide packages for
OpenLDAP and 389 DS, it probably makes sense for us to say "FreeIPA
(built atop 389 DS) is the recommended LDAP server in the Fedora
Server". We can then focus our efforts on making the setup and
configuration experience of FreeIPA be awesome. I'd like to see us do
this with something like pre-written configuration tools (ansible,
puppet, cfengine, etc.) and provide a simplistic UI for deploying
them. (This could be a remote GUI, a curses UI or *other*. I'm not
defining that right now and don't want to rat-hole)

For some other examples (and yes, some of these could easily become
flamewars):

Fedora Server prefers postfix as the SMTP server and provides a
role-assignment to set it up.

Fedora Server prefers Samba 4 as the file-sharing server and provides
a role-assignment to set it up.

Fedora Server prefers FreeIPA (again) as the DNS server and provides a
role-assignment to set it up.

Fedora Server prefers OpenSSH-lpk as the secure-shell server and
installs it by default.

Fedora Server prefers Apache HTTPD 2.4 as the web-server and provides
copious documentation on how to tweak it.

Fedora Server prefers PostgreSQL as a database server and provides a
role-assignment to set it up (and create additional databases).


And so on. I'm sure there are plenty of other examples we could come
up with.


A few points:

1) We should allow anyone who wants to install an alternative to do
so, but they may need to fend for themselves the way they do now.

2) We are selecting a very limited list of solutions that we are going
to polish up and make easy to deploy in recommended configurations.

3) The use of our simplified tools to deploy must not interfere with
the ability of the administrator to tweak them the way they can today.
We are only talking about providing useful defaults to get people up
and running quickly.
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