On Mon, 2013-11-25 at 09:23 -0800, Adam Williamson wrote:
On Mon, 2013-11-25 at 13:59 +0100, Christian Fredrik Kalager Schaller wrote:
Hi everyone, First of all apologize for this taking so long, I ended up traveling non-stop for some time visiting some of Red Hats desktop customers. While not directly tied to the work of this working group I do hope to take some of the lessons learned from those meetings with me into the future work of the working group.
Anyway I tried editing the PRD a bit based on the feedback we got on the first draft. I tried to make a few items a bit clearer and also to include spelling fixes contributed and so on.
We probably want to do another WG meeting soon to discuss next steps.
Feel free to let me know if I forgot to include some important feedback or if further clarifications are needed.
"Upgrading the system multiple times through the upgrade process should give a result that is the same as an original install of Fedora Workstation."
Based on my experience (>10 years of it, with multiple distributions and OSes), this is an incredibly ambitious goal. It may in fact be entirely unachievable as written. I'm not aware of a single operating system in existence which actually achieves this. Even cellphone manufacturers - who have a very clearly-defined single piece of hardware to deal with, and a much smaller set of software and use cases to worry about than we have - don't achieve this. I'm really not sure it should be front and centre in a foundational document without some really convincing evidence that it's even vaguely achievable.
Yes, this is an ambitious goal. I hope we can have ambitious goals for Fedora workstation. But it's also a really important goal. Currently we put Fedora users into an impossible situation:
* Fedora releases frequently * Fedora has a short supported release lifetime * Every upgrade of a Fedora system is somewhat hazardous * If you serially upgrade a Fedora system many times, even if there is no out-right breakage, there is degradation.
The main target of Fedora workstation is a technical user of some sort, but we can't just assume that they'll know how to fix their system or have an inclination to do so - most technical users are not operating system engineers.
If we don't want to support Fedora workstation releases for the lifetime of the user's hardware (5-7 years), then we need to figure out how to make upgrades non-events.
An image-based approach to operating system installation and upgrades is an efficient technical means to this end - but not the only way to get there. The starting point is a system definition - if any possible combination of packages from the Fedora package universe with any arbitrarily changed set of config files is a valid Fedora workstation configuration, then upgrading can never work.
- Owen