I realized this morning that we never actually came to a resolution on the plans for reducing the package set in Fedora 24[1] (it's too late to make changes for Fedora 23).
The set of package groups that are installed by default for Fedora Server: * Hardware and virtualization guest support * @server-product (individual packages we've decided we need, like chrony) * @headless-management (cockpit, openssh, rolekit, tog-pegasus[3]) * @container-management (Docker) * @domain-client (realmd, freeipa-client, winbind)
The complete selection of available packages[2] on the Server DVD is much larger and basically includes everything from the "Infrastructure Server" environment group on the old DVD, most of which is probably *not* useful on the install media, in my opinion.
I'd like to propose that we make one of the following changes for Fedora 24:
Option A) Remove everything from the DVD that isn't part of the default installation, then add back in individual options that have demonstrable value.
Option B) Remove everything from the DVD that isn't part of the default installation or one of the supported rolekit roles, then add back in individual options that have demonstrable value.
From the discussion on the mailing list, the most common argument was "But what about disconnected operation?", but the fact of the matter seemed to be that even with our current large (and eclectic) package set, there are still packages that some people want that aren't on the image. Since this set varies wildly between deployments, I personally don't feel that it makes sense to try to accommodate all of this on the image. Instead, I think we should be more straight-up in defining that the DVD ISO carries the Fedora Server Operating System and that add-on capabilities require a network repository (local or internet).
If we go with either of these choices, I'm personally more highly in favor of Option A) than Option B). The mechanism for rolekit involves always grabbing the latest stable version of the roles from the network anyway, so carrying them on the disk is of limited use outside of the completely disconnected case. See also my original email[1] on the subject for how avoiding these on the images can also help us avoid release slippage in some situations.
[1] https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/server/2015-August/001968 .html [2] https://git.fedorahosted.org/cgit/spin-kickstarts.git/tree/fedora-i nstall-server.ks [3] This was in place to support OpenLMI, but we're not actually doing this, so we should probably drop it.
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