Dropping a lot of files from the DVD

[Simo Sorce]

On Mon, 2015-08-10 at 14:46 -0400, Stephen Gallagher wrote:
> 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).

So the DVD just become a netinstall++ ?

I am not against it, just want to understand what will be left back.
Will there be packages enough to have a GUI for example ? Or will they
all be "available from the network" ?

Simo.

-- 
Simo Sorce * Red Hat, Inc * New York