Dropping a lot of files from the DVD

[Stephen Gallagher]

During the F23 Alpha release process, we hit upon a bug[1] in FreeIPA
(actually tomcatjss) that prevented the Domain Controller deployment
from working (or FreeIPA from being installed at all). We were able to
handwave this at Alpha by observing that almost no one actually
installs the packages from the DVD and rolekit defaults to updating
from the network anyway. So we were able to fix this for Alpha without
necessitating a respin of the media (and causing a slip of the
release).

We also had another bug[2] that caused compose issues which was related
to a FTBFS with the perl-MongoDB package.

It got several of us thinking, however. Why are we shipping much
(most?) of the stuff we have on the DVD? I can understand some of the
choices we've made, like shipping support packages for uncommon (but
not unheard-of) hardware as optional installs, but why are we shipping
the "perl-web" group? Or PHP? Do we really need the load-balancer and
high-availability groups right there on the disk?

I'd like to propose that we drop from the Server installation
everything that is not either part of the default install as it now
stands or an optional component for hardware support.

This would mean that we could remove a lot of historical cruft; all of
the things we are dropping would remain available post-install or via a
network install. They would simply stop being available from a DVD
install.

There's a new feature[3] of rolekit that I have been working on that
will allow us to deploy roles as part of kickstart, but it does not
require that the packages actually be on the DVD at all; it only
requires that the system have a valid network connection upon booting
up for the first time. The way it will work is by creating a systemd
service unit during the kickstart %post that will fire once the network
is up on the newly-booted system and then will proceed to pull the
packages from the appropriate repositories and start the roles.

Going this route would significantly reduce the size of the DVD as well
as the risk that issues in one of our supported roles would block the
release. (They would still need to be fixed and pushed stable for 0
-day, but they wouldn't necessitate a respin of the media and thus a
new validation run).

If we approve this plan, we'll probably need to amend the release
criteria to accommodate it.

Thoughts? I'd like to put this plan in place well in advance of Beta so
that we can validate it with early test composes (and not risk
slippage).



[1] https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1250724
[2] https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1134882
[3] https://github.com/libre-server/rolekit/issues/1
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