Interested in helping improve the Fedora desktop experience?

[Adam Jackson]

On Wed, 2009-10-21 at 10:44 -0400, Seth Vidal wrote:
> On Wed, 21 Oct 2009, Máirín Duffy wrote:
> > Jon showed me last week how terrible our live media install experience
> > is. We definitely need to identify all the issues and work through ways
> > of improving it.
> 
> Can you list the ways the live media install experience is bad? I'm not 
> familiar with this list and I'm curious about it.

You don't get package or repo selection.  Therefore you also don't get
to install straight from updates, so there's an update cycle after
rebooting.  Filesystem choice is limited to whatever the live image
itself is, so no btrfs for you.  The packages you get are _also_ limited
to whatever the live image itself is, which is arbitrarily constrained
by needing to fit on a CD.

You could solve this by separating the notions of "live test drive
media" and "live installer", and in the latter case you could ship
actual RPMs to install from.  Alternatively, you could do the initial
glorified parted+dd+resize2fs and then run package selection like a
normal anaconda upgrade, although that still doesn't give you filesystem
selection.  You could get filesystem selection by replacing the dd bit
with a tar/untar pipeline, but you'd probably make the actual install
slower in the process (although, who knows by how much).

If you're really crazy, you could do essentially half of deltarpm to
recreate the "local" rpms as an on-the-fly repo, and then drive the
entire rest of the experience like normal, package/filesystem choice and
all [1].  Again, probably going to be slower than dd, but would require
no additional space on the media.

Also, though this gets a little away from the anaconda experience
proper: booting a CD really is slow, and we're doing users a disservice
by not suggesting USB keys or even just burning to DVD (leaving aside
the issues of size).

[1] - Yes, I'm aware of the non-idempotency implied by scriptlets, and
I'm choosing to plug my ears and/or require that any packages on the
live media need to be QA-checked for sanity on that axis.

- ajax
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