will F18 allow simultaneous installation of more than one desktop?

[Christopher A. Williams]

On Mon, 2012-07-09 at 18:58 -0500, David Lehman wrote:
> On Mon, 2012-07-09 at 15:57 -0700, Adam Williamson wrote:
> > On Mon, 2012-07-09 at 14:50 -0500, David Lehman wrote:
> > 
> > > > > > Please show researched statistics to support your claim and implication
> > > > > > that this is a minority group. I question and doubt you actually have
> > > > > > statistics on any of these groups.
> > > > > 
> > > > > Too busy trying to actually do work, but thanks for offering to help.
> > > > 
> > > > Nice try. I didn't offer to help on this one. You alleged something as a
> > > > point without anything to back it up. I just asked you to back up what
> > > > you're saying. If you can't do that, it's not my problem. It just means
> > > > I'm winning on this part of the argument.
> > > 
> > > I was being sarcastic about you offering to help.
> > 
> > Sorry, Chris wins this one. You made an unsupported assertion; he called
> > you out on it and asked for support; you failed to support your argument
> > and instead decided to fall back on the old standby of saying 'you
> > didn't offer to help with the code'. I don't see how this works as a
> > response to the argument; are you seriously suggesting that no-one can
> > point out an unsupported assertion except someone who is actively
> > writing code alongside you?
> 
> No, I was just annoyed by the tone of the email's author. He's got me
> dead to rights: I did not conduct any surveys. Doesn't change anything.

Sorry if I annoyed you. That wasn't my intent. I was trying to get to
the truthful bottom of the rationale behind this design decision because
there is clearly a strong, rational argument against it. The only thing
that hasn't changed here is that you are holding to this decision with
quite a bit of dogmatic persistence. I and others are trying to figure
out why and what can be done about that decision. Yes, I was asking hard
and pointed questions, and in the process, was probably needling you a
bit as well.

My friends tell me it's a gift I have. :-) I meant no personal ill will
by it.

> > > > Let's cut to the chase here: Your actual motivation for all of this is
> > > > that you want to limit the amount of work that you do. You're just
> > > > disguising it in all sorts of excuses. Why not just say that you don't
> > > 
> > > It's amusing that you assume I am shunning a piece of work, presumably
> > > in order to gain free time, as though I have no other work to keep me
> > > busy for the foreseeable future.
> > 
> > That also looks like a shabby argument to me, David. You're the one
> > doing the assuming, not Chris. You cut his paragraph right before he
> > went on to posit two possible alternative reasons why you might be
> > limiting the amount of work: "you don't want to do it" *or* "you don't
> > have the cycles to do it". The fact that he raised both possibilities
> > clearly indicates he was not assuming either of them.
> 
> I was off in the weeds with the "too hard" line of argument. I never
> needed it. To be clear, this decision has nothing to do with limiting
> the amount of work we are doing for the UI rewrite. There is nothing
> difficult about installing multiple desktop environments from the
> installer perspective as far as I know. I was mis-remembering
> upgrade-related shenanigans related to desktops and login managers.
> 
> The simple truth is that there are a lot of reasons for organizing
> things into a desktop (or base spin/flavor/variant) and add-ons. One
> thing it enables is a unification of the current spins with the non-live
> OS install so they don't have different output products.

OK. I can buy this as a rational argument for your position. I agree
that, with a base install and defaults selected, the Live and DVD
installs should produce exactly the same outputs. This has been a
long-standing issue when doing post-install work resulting in lots of
individual problems.

I still believe this can be managed with options on the installer for
multiple DEs, but would also concede that this could be an additional
capability that is both more complex and less important than producing
something truly consistent. I can support sacrificing this capability
for the short term if true consistency can be achieved in the process. I
would, however, still want to see multiple DEs as a (near) future
enhancement.

> If you want a second or third desktop environment, great. Install it
> some way other than in anaconda's GUI.  I also provided two alternatives
> very early on in this discussion: use kickstart for install or use the
> package manager of your choice, post-install. I said this in my first or
> second post on this subject. I should have ignored the follow-ups.
> Hopefully next time I will.

I didn't miss these alternatives, but rather took issue with them. The
issue is that both of these alternatives increase the level of
inconvenience (time and effort) for installing multiple DEs, and this
change in the installer as implemented leads to a loss of function that
is clearly being used by at least some. Whenever you advocate taking
away function that others are using, especially when positioning it as
an upgrade or enhancement, you will always get push-back. That will be
true no matter how strongly (right or wrong) you believe that function
needs to be taken away.

Again, if that is a short-term sacrifice for the sake of consistency,
OK. I would still advocate that the base libraries for at least GNOME
and KDE should still be installed so that applications from each DE are
not limited in the same way up front. Most folks use apps from both
today, and F17 still has at least some KDE apps available by default
even if you only install GNOME. I doubt that's going to change anytime
soon since, as others have pointed out, best of breed apps come from
both DEs.

...And thanks for being a stand-up guy about all this in the end.

Chris

-- 
Christopher A. Williams <chriswfedora at cawllc.com>