Thank you for reviewing. I am going to respond to the items below, and also introduce the issue that we would like to see this spin delivered not as an ISO, but as a disk image. That will help scope some of the answers below. This will change the release engineering a bit as the image will need to be built with the appliance-tools, istead of livecd-tools. The appliance-tools are based on the livecd-tools base clases, so the process should not be much different.
Comments below. David Huff, please see the question on SELinux.
Jeroen van Meeuwen wrote:
Bryan Kearney wrote:
I would like to submit for approval an Appliance Operating System (AOS) Spin. This spin is part of the appliance-tools feature [1] and also part of the thincrust project [2]. The Kickstart file can be found in the repo [3] but I have flattened it and attached it to this email.
The goal of this spin is to provide a minimal base upon which software appliances can be built. The main deployment for appliances is expected to be virtual machine, but since there are no kernel changes this could work bare metal as well. This would be the fedora implementation of a JeOS [4].
First of all, it's great to see this "special" spin being submitted for review and possibly being released alongside Fedora 10 as a perfect showcase of how both spins as well as the JeOS or AOS work.
== Name ==
The name I would choose to give to this spin is "Fedora AOS" (at which point the name of the kickstart becomes "fedora-livecd-aos.ks" or possibly just "fedora-live-aos.ks".
Good comment. I have renamed it fedora-aos.ks. This seems to take the heart of your suggestion as well as reflect the fact that this is an image not an ISO.
== Feature Page ==
The feature page is more extensive then other Spin's feature pages because this particular spin is only part of a feature. To be able to track the Spin Feature separately, we may need a separate AOS Spin Feature page. I'm not sure how other involved parties are seeing this (eg. Feature wrangler / Release Engineering).
At the FESCo meeting, I was told to submit the feeature to RE. I think it is good enough, but am happy to break out another tracking feature if that is necessary.
Whereas the appliance-tools has additional features compared to livecd-tools, this particular spin is a perfect showcase, and a great way to test whatever it is someone might want to do.
It may need a little clarification though on why a user should use this spin (eg. scope and target audience things).
I re-worked the benefits section of the feature [1] to make clear what the AOS was providing. Does that address the concern?
== Kickstart ==
First of all, since this is a unique spin concept in that it has a specific goal, these notes and corresponding feedback needs to be taken into account by the Spin SIG as well as the spin maintainers...
- SELinux on this spin is disabled. Although understandable, we would
like to see if SELinux could be enabled, or hear about why it is disabled entirely (rather then set permissive). SELinux is a major major feature in Fedora as well as RHEL, so we would like to preserve SELinux as a feature on all spins.
There is an issue with the appliance-tools and selinux. I will need to defer to David Huff on this and have him respond in a separate message.
- A root password is set, which is understandable for real live systems
but is not conform the other spin concepts where an additional, normal user is created and the root password is removed. If there is a motivation for setting a root password and not creating a (regular) user in this spin concept, please let us know.
This spin is really seen as a base upon which someone would "build" an appliance. As appliances tend to be locked down in most cases, the root user is probably the only user who would log into the machine. Anyone building upon this would probably want to remove the user.
- the partitioning configuration has --ondisk sda as well as --fstype
ext3 which is not taken into account with creating a live spin.
The appliance-tools do take these into acocunt, and utilize them to set up the partitioning on disk.
- the package manifest includes @core, which is included already
Removed it.
- the kickstart removes fedora-logos, but does not add another logos
package, resulting in that fedora-logos still ends up on the image. A minor problem for when the spin is approved by the Board for trademark usage, but you may want to add "generic-logos" to the manifest for now.
I have added in generic logos. Once the new tradmark policy is put into place, I would like to add the secondary marks to this kickstart file.
- the network isn't started on boot. Note that the network service does
not start on boot by default anymore, in favor of the NetworkManager service, which is not available on this spin, and which I think would also not be favorable to the spin's specific use case.
I added a services line to enable this at startup.
== Image Size ==
The image size composed against today's rawhide is 117M, which should definitely fit on a CD (~690-700M), or some of the even smaller media for that matter.
Noted the aforementioned issues this overall looks as a great spin to include in the release. Please change or motivate the issues set forth and we'll gladly take another stab at this spin ;-)
Kind regards,
Jeroen van Meeuwen -kanarip
Thanks again. Updated kickstart file is attached.
--bk
[1] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/ApplianceTools#Benefit_to_Fedora