Hey folks! So I've filed a bug recently which may need wider discussion about the resolution. The bug report is: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1933378 The problem is this. If plymouth is installed but no graphical theme is installed/configured - which is currently the case for at least Server and minimal installs - plymouth uses a 'fallback' text theme, which Hans says is under-maintained. Since around Fedora-Rawhide- 20210122.n.0, openQA has been encountering an intermittent problem where this theme does not clear properly when boot is complete and the console login is shown, it looks like this: https://openqa.fedoraproject.org/tests/799388#step/_console_wait_login/6 It gets worse once you actually try and log in - bits of the grey background get wiped and replaced with black in ugly patterns, this both looks dumb and makes working around the bug in openQA by adding more screenshots impractical (because the pattern of the background just keeps changing). This bug does not seem to happen if a Plymouth graphical theme is installed and configured, only if the fallback text theme is used. In the bug report, we did a bit of looking into what bits of Plymouth are installed when. In comps, 'plymouth' itself is listed as 'mandatory' in @core. This seems to ultimately date back to https://pagure.io/fedora-comps/c/0dca8c2b3f04624873918e6dfef12f27bf1a6d75 by Bill, which was in response to https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=801087 (the bug number in the commit is a typo). The commit claims "Add plymouth to core, to match prior releases", but it was *not* in @core in "previous releases" so far as I can tell; it may have been pulled into minimal installs via dependencies (I can check an F16 minimal install later). 'plymouth-system-theme' - which installs the default graphical theme - is in the 'base-x' group. So only package sets that include base-x will install a graphical theme for Plymouth. This includes all major desktops, but does *not* include at least Server or minimal installs (and probably some other subsets I'm not thinking of). Anything that includes @core but *not* @base-x will hit the broken configuration. Obviously one option here is just to fix the bug in Plymouth, but Hans suggested that we should fix it by not installing Plymouth in this configuration - i.e. we should only ever install plymouth and plymouth- system-theme or no plymouth at all. If you don't have plymouth installed, you get a very old-school "wall of text" boot process; if there are encrypted system partitions, you get a plain text prompt for the encryption passphrase, with no keyboard layout indicator (I'm not sure if the text theme indicates the keyboard layout either). Starting from a minimal install with plymouth omitted, adding just plymouth itself pulls in 3 packages (plymouth, plymouth-core-libs, plymouth-scripts) with an installed size of 621K. Adding plymouth- system-theme pulls in 32 packages with an installed size of 24M. So putting plymouth-system-theme in @core would substantially inflate the size of @core in terms of both number of packages and overall installed size. Removing plymouth from @core would not save a lot in terms of packages or space. So, I guess the question here is, what do we do? 1) Remove plymouth from @core 2) Add plymouth-system-theme to @core 3) Make Hans/Ray/someone fix the plymouth bug Opinions? :) Thanks! -- Adam Williamson Fedora QA IRC: adamw | Twitter: adamw_ha https://www.happyassassin.net _______________________________________________ devel mailing list -- devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe send an email to devel-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Fedora Code of Conduct: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/code-of-conduct/ List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines List Archives: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Do not reply to spam on the list, report it: https://pagure.io/fedora-infrastructure
