[Fedora-spins] Board SWG questions for Spins Owners

[Christoph Wickert]

Am Donnerstag, den 25.02.2010, 10:50 -0500 schrieb Bill Nottingham:
> Christoph Wickert (christoph.wickert at googlemail.com) said: 
> > [snipped]
> > > 
> > > Given the present situation:
> > > 
> > >    1. Has any Spin found the present situation unduly restrictive?
> > >          1. If so, how specifically? 
> > 
> > A spin is defined as installable Live-CD. This means it must ship
> > anaconda and firstboot. firstboot requires system-config-keyboard
> > requires metacity requires GConf2 and tons of other GNOME stuff. There
> > are other dependency chains as well (e.g. notification-daemon), but this
> > is the worst one.
> 
> I'm not sure what your objection is here. Are you objecting to the
> fact that it must be a LiveCD, the fact that the LiveCD installer
> uses anaconda/firstboot, or the dependencies of anaconda/firstboot?

Sorry if i was unclear: I am objecting to the dependencies of
system-config-keyboard. AFAICS it is not run embedded in firstboot and
there is no need for a window-manager at that point. authconfig-gtk on
the other hand requires one because it starts popup windows, but these
work fine with whatever window manager is available. You can see this in
the spins already.

> The first is a policy issue that could be redressed. The second is
> unlikely to change (and would imply you'd be signing up to write your
> own if you didn't want to use anaconda/firstboot, which I can't imagine
> is what you want), and the third probably requires patch submissions.
> 
> (Note: due to the requirements for a window manager at installation
> time, anaconda may very well require metacity in the near future.)

Why not a virtual provide and let the spin maintainers and users decide?
In F12 we changed anaconda to use any display manager that has a virtual
provides for "service(graphical-login)" instead of hardcoding a list of
display managers. We should do the same for window manager. Introducing
a new hardcoded requirement for metacity with all it's overhead is a
step backwards and a punch in the face of all people who are not using
GNOME.

> > For example, there is a package called gconf2-branding-openSUSE which
> > contains all the modified GConf schemas. By replacing this package, you
> > can change the complete settings of the GNOME desktop. This would be
> > useful for us too, think of a GNOME based Fedora Mini Spin for Netbooks,
> > that wants to use another other panel layout. We cannot do this in
> > Fedora ATM, but it is possible.
> 
> What prevents you doing in in Fedora? Have you submitted a package
> review, or an example spec?

I cannot submit a package review because the files included in the
package conflict with the current packages. Before we can change
something we need a packaging policy and in the past the GNOME
maintainers have been unwilling to support these kind of changes.

> Bill

Regards,
Christoph