starting Fedora Server SIG

[Seth Vidal]

On Fri, 14 Nov 2008, Colin Walters wrote:

> On Fri, Nov 14, 2008 at 1:30 AM, Seth Vidal <skvidal at fedoraproject.org> wrote:
>>
>> It uses ANY memory. That's more than is reasonable considering that the
>> former solution (ifconfig) uses none.
>
> NM and ifconfig are not comparable.  Now I think saying that NM
> shouldn't use very much in the way of resources in the static routing
> case is a reasonable request; certainly with the push for
> virtualization and running lots of OS instances it makes sense.  But
> it's just not reasonable to say "ANY" memory; that's not a reasonable
> constraint to operate under.  We're trying to build an operating
> system; that necessitates adding APIs and features, for example
> network status change notification which is useful everywhere.
>
> It's perfectly fine though if someone's "create mediawiki appliance
> image" tool strips out stuff; but we should be moving the core OS to
> be more unified and featureful in general.

Featureful is exciting for desktops and for a smaller subset of servers 
with special needs. For the vast majority of fairly boring servers it is 
not exciting, it's just time consuming.

I've got no problem saying that people who use servers should have a 
custom ks that strips out all the stuff they don't need. In fact, I 
believe I've ALWAYS said that. I just don't want us to take steps that 
make setting up that custom ks outrageously difficult. If we end up 
tying the dependencies on these daemons very very low into the distro then 
we end up making a lot of fairly boring server admins' lives difficult for no 
good reason. All I'm saying is that the features that make NM useful 
should not preclude someone from yum removing it w/o losing their whole 
os.

Oh and my general opinion is that the features we should be working on 
more than anything else are simplicity, security and stability.


-sv