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
