On 10/16/23 16:44, Ancor Gonzalez Sosa wrote:
We need to talk. ;-)
As you may know, the YaST Team is developing an alternative installer called Agama (formerly D-Installer). https://github.com/openSUSE/agama
We want the workflow in Agama to be simpler than with YaST. Even without any selection of packages to install.
But quite some people expressed their desire of being able to customize the software selection while installing the operating system itself.
Thanks everybody for the useful feedback scattered though this thread. After studying the unveiled problems and challenges (like multi-product repositories) and taking a closer look to how system roles are being used nowadays at openSUSE (see [1]), we decided how to move forward in Agama. Bear in mind this is an iterative development process, so nothing stops us from re-evaluating this decision in the future. Remember in Agama we already have the concept of "product". The only SUSE enterprise product we currently support is ALP Dolomite (SLE is out of the Agama scope). For openSUSE, the concept of product is currently used to distinguish between three possibilities: Tumbleweed, openSUSE MicroOS and a future ALP-based Leap. With all that, we have decided to try this: 1) Agama is NOT introducing any concept analogous to the YaST's system roles. 2) The software selection will display a curated list of patterns per product, but the designation will not be based in any new flag in the patterns side. Instead, the list will be kept in the definition of the product itself (ie. in the Agama configuration file for each product). We still may need to improve some patterns or introduce new ones. 3) The lists at the previous point (one list per product) will be kept short. As a consequence, the Agama pattern selection screen will be simplified. 4) We are not forced to limit ourselves to the current list of products. We may break some of them into different products if we feel it's useful to present a particular use-case that implies a different mindset and should imply different installer options. For example, we could have five products instead of three with something like Tumbleweed, Transactional Tumbleweed, MicroOS, MicroOS Desktop and Leap-Next. I'm just making the list up. The exact partition (if any is needed) will be decided as we move. On the following weeks we will come-up with a prototype and we can move from there. We may ask for help to create the lists of patterns or to improve/create patterns. Stay tuned. [1] https://gist.github.com/ancorgs/92857310d50fe7672bc09351fa0a8212 -- Ancor González Sosa YaST Team at SUSE Software Solutions