Hi Ancor, On Tue, 2023-11-21 at 15:42 +0100, Ancor Gonzalez Sosa wrote:
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.
Thanks for reassuring on this. I think it's understood by most people, but somtimes being explicit about such things is a good thing.
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.
Sounds fair - let's see how far we get with this (most complexity we had over time, like 'role implying network managing stack' or such, are gone.
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.
Seeing how often/seldom we introduced new 'roles', I think we can prefectly get away with this. Is the pattern description displayed the one from the pattern itself or is this 'just' a matching table?
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.
Simplified is good - See GNOME :)
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.
Looking at the current roles in the standard TW installer, we already have some 'overlap' between MicroOS and Tumbleweed, namely Server-RO: that's pretty much the same I'd say (possibly with slighly larger package pre-selection applied)
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.
Absolutley looking forward to that! Cheers, Dominique