Re: Updated Fedora Workstation PRD draft

[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]



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


-- 
desktop mailing list
desktop@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop





[Index of Archives]     [Fedora Users]     [Fedora KDE]     [Fedora Announce]     [Fedora Docs]     [Fedora Config]     [PAM]     [Red Hat Development]     [Red Hat 9]     [Gimp]     [Yosemite News]

  Powered by Linux