New Fedora 22 Change Proposal: Fedora Atomic

[Colin Walters]

On Thu, Jul 24, 2014, at 02:50 PM, Chris Murphy wrote:
> 
> Is the eventual idea that Fedora Atomic will be a separate product, or
> will it be a sub-product/variant of Server (or Server and Cloud) that
> merely differs in how it gets updated?

There's been no discussion of it being a top level entity.

> Where does this leave the Roller Derby project? Does it merge with Fedora
> Atomic, or does it go away, or does it leverage a dnf plug-in approach in
> contrast to an rpm-ostree approach?

No one is actively working on Roller Derby at the moment, but one aspect
of it that I still think is important to capture is tooling for
snapshots of *data* in addition to "snapshots" of the OS.

There are definitely cases where one wants to do that in concert.  And
also very strong cases for allowing them to be separate.

If a kernel upgrade goes wrong, you very likely don't want to rollback
your mysql database.

But on a major version upgrade, I can see it being very handy to also
snapshot one's data.  Data backups though are quite well covered by a
wide array of existing free and proprietary software.

> Where does this leave Workstation? Its PRD lists a "Better
> upgrade/rollback control" requirement. And its tech spec says
> "gnome-software will use PackageKit with the hawkey backend". Since
> Server PRD and TC don't have an equivalent to this, it's curious that the
> one project explicitly intended to do what the Workstation PRD requires,
> is moving under the Server umbrella.

I don't think the rpm-ostree/Atomic model is applicable to general
Workstation use at the current time - not having the ability to add or
remove packages is much less practical for the freeform development
model.

That said, I think it *is* applicable for the specialized Workstation
use case of a replicated "Corporate Standard Build", where each client
machine is supposed to be running the same software.  For that though,
the lack of a PackageKit backend is a large gap, though it's of course
possible to script updates.