On Fri, 2014-10-03 at 12:37 -0400, Matthew Miller wrote:
On Wed, Oct 01, 2014 at 04:28:22PM -0400, Stephen Gallagher wrote:
> The thing to note is that in all scenarios, the user *MUST* fully update
> their F20 system first, or the results will be undefined and could be
> unpleasant. We need to spell this out very clearly to our upgrading
> users.
Here's what I'm thinking...
Converting from vanilla to and from productized Fedora is a separate issue
from upgrading. It's something that someone might want to do at any point,
and it's something that we'll want to have beyond just the F21 release.
Are arbitrary inter-product conversions supportable long-term? We can
test if a default install of F20 converts into a reasonable
approximation of Fedora Workstation 21. But are we going test that a F23
Workstation converts properly to a F23 Server?
I can see the convenience value of letting people check a box or give
a flag
at the F20->F21 upgrade point. I wish we had thought of that several months
ago, but I don't think anyone did (or we dropped it if it were mentioned,
sadly). At this point, since the fedup maintainers aren't sold and we're
working on validating the beta already, *and* because the upgrade-to-convert
situation is a one time thing, I think we should put our efforts into the
convert-at-any-time situation.
I don't see it as a convenience value - rather it's our main point of
control make sure that everybody who wants to be on a product line
actually ends up on a product line.
As an example: this subject came up on the workstation mailing list
because there was a proposal to make the network login functionality in
Fedora 21 a package that is pulled in by fedora-release-workstation
rather than gnome-shell. If we carry through with that (probably depends
on the result of this discussion), then people who upgraded to
non-productized F21 would be missing one of the most useful new features
in Fedora 21 workstation.
But that's just one example of how a non-productized Fedora is not what
we're advertising. With subsequent releases of Fedora the gap will grow
- but *now* is the best time to make people pick a product if they want
one.
We could compensate a bit for lack of the feature by making fedup put up
a big warning message that directed people to a wiki page with manual
instructions - I don't think it looks professional, but it would be
better than nothing.
- Owen