Hello Silverblue and IoT teams. The FCOS team got together with Fedora releng last week to discuss the issue regarding package layering that periodically plagues us (https://github.com/coreos/fedora-coreos-tracker/issues/400). The solution we believe will help all OSTree based editions involves creating an archive repo where any package that has made it to the Fedora stable repositories can be accessed at a later time. In general, we think this should solve the problem because we should be able to install packages that won't require updating the base layer.
Goals:
- help solve the same problem for Fedora CoreOS, Fedora Silverblue, and Fedora IoT - don't add to mirror network requirements - i.e., store/host the content somewhere else. AWS is a candidate here. - keep traditional systems behavior the same - don't enable archive repo(s) by default on non-ostree distributions
Since it can take a long time to create repos for large package sets we may end up creating more than one repo that gets updated at different cadences. For example:
- One that gets updated weekly - all packages obsoleted before X date - large package set, so we run it once a week - One that gets updated nightly - all packages obsoleted after X date - small package set, so we can run it nightly
This is still a work in progress and the design may take a few turns as we work out the details and/or find new information.
Having this new repository will help us in Fedora CoreOS as we have a stable stream that lags behind Fedora stable repos. It should also help Fedora Silverblue when they move to a release cadence that doesn't match the bodhi updates repos. I'm not sure how much of a problem this currently is in Fedora IoT, but I imagine Fedora IoT has similar problems.
Thoughts?
Dusty Mabe