Re: Fedora 32 System-Wide Change proposal: Drop Optical Media Release Criterion

[Miro Hrončok]

On 12. 12. 19 21:37, Ben Cotton wrote:

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/Drop_Optical_Media_Criterion

= Drop Optical Media Release Criterion =

== Summary ==
Proposal to make all Fedora optical media non-blocking. This means
we'd stop blocking on bugs found during the installation of Fedora
from optical media (like CDs and DVDs). This doesn't mean that
installation from optical media would stop working, just that the
Fedora Release wouldn't be blocked on any issues that can pop up in
Fedora installation using this method. Installation from USB devices
will remain blocking.


One more thing I have relized quite recently is that we still offer the ISO file 
as a DVD ISO on https://getfedora.org/en/workstation/download/


While technically, this is correct (the best kind of correct), maybe we should 
rebrand it somehow if we consider optical media obsolete?


--
Miro Hrončok
--
Phone: +420777974800
IRC: mhroncok
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Re: Fedora 32 System-Wide Change proposal: Drop Optical Media Release Criterion

[John M. Harris Jr]

On Wednesday, December 18, 2019 10:01:02 AM MST Matthew Miller wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 17, 2019 at 07:33:12PM -0600, Chris Adams wrote:
> 
> > > Well, this definitely affects those using Fedora for enterprise
> > > purposes. It's incredible how much businesses still rely on optical
> > > media for these things.
> > 
> > Again, you're projecting from an anecdote of one.  My anecdote of one is
> > that the vast majority of system in my company (around 400 employees
> > IIRC) don't have an optical drive.  I'm actually not sure if any of the
> 
> 
> I think John is talking about rackmount hardware. But John, in this case,
> aren't you booting from virtualized media via idrac (or whatever brand
> equivalent), not literally a burned physical DVD?

In one of the environments that I support at $WORK, I wouldn't have an option 
other than physical optical media. However, you are correct in that the 
example I provided earlier was for iDRAC (or equivalent) optical drive 
emulation. Several times, I have found images which would work with qemu's -
cdrom option, but not with an iDRAC's VirtualCD implementation, or in an 
actual optical drive.

-- 
John M. Harris, Jr.
Splentity

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Re: Fedora 32 System-Wide Change proposal: Drop Optical Media Release Criterion

[Matthew Miller]

On Tue, Dec 17, 2019 at 07:33:12PM -0600, Chris Adams wrote:
> > Well, this definitely affects those using Fedora for enterprise
> > purposes. It's incredible how much businesses still rely on optical
> > media for these things.
> Again, you're projecting from an anecdote of one.  My anecdote of one is
> that the vast majority of system in my company (around 400 employees
> IIRC) don't have an optical drive.  I'm actually not sure if any of the

I think John is talking about rackmount hardware. But John, in this case,
aren't you booting from virtualized media via idrac (or whatever brand
equivalent), not literally a burned physical DVD?

-- 
Matthew Miller

Fedora Project Leader
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Re: Fedora 32 System-Wide Change proposal: Drop Optical Media Release Criterion

[Frantisek Zatloukal]

On Wed, Dec 18, 2019 at 1:37 AM John M. Harris Jr 
wrote:

> But it would mean that Fedora would potentially release with optical boot
> broken.


Yes, and it was said about a million times in all threads regarding this
change proposal.  There is no need to say it again and again.

Yes, it can result (probably won't in the foreseeable future) in broken
optical media boot. And yes, I still stand for this change proposal.
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Re: Fedora 32 System-Wide Change proposal: Drop Optical Media Release Criterion

[Solomon Peachy]

On Tue, Dec 17, 2019 at 08:09:14PM -0700, John M. Harris Jr wrote:
> It's simply not the case that optical drives have been uncommon on 
> end-user systems for over 6 years. As we found earlier in this thread, 
> they're on 1/3rd of stock desktops from a standard consumer vendor, 
> and on most systems that are sold to enterprise customers as designed 
> to run RHEL, at least from one of the major vendors of enterprise 
> hardware.

And that only matters if those systems won't boot off a USB stick.  
These days, folks are far, far more likely to have a random 2GB USB 
stick lying around than blank DVD media. 

(And even a bottom-of-the-barrel USB stick is going to perform vastly 
 better than an optical drive.  Two orders of magnitude better access 
 time, and all that..)

> Fedora runs on much more than just systems produced within the last 10 
> years. For example, the laptop I'm using to send this message is now 
> 11 years old. All of my personal servers are between 9 and 12 years 
> old. These all run Fedora, without issue. I'm definitely not the only 
> one running Fedora on "old" hardware.

Not counting a couple of Raspberry Pi units, the newest system I have 
deployed is a 5-year-old laptop with an increasingly-flaky motherboard.  

The oldest dates from 2007, and is only in service because its erstwhile 
replacement spectacularly expelled its magic smoke.

FWIW, most of my upgrades have been triggered by hardware failures.

> How so? Do you believe it's an issue with Fedora, or with the systems 
> themselves? I'd be happy to help you diagnose this off-list, or on the 
> users list.

Oh, it's purely hardware reliability, nothing to do with Fedora itself.

Normal stuff like hard drives, fans, power supplies, and expired CMOS 
batteries.  Relatively hostile environmental conditions don't help.

 - Solomon
-- 
Solomon Peachy pizza at shaftnet dot org
High Springs, FL  ^^ (email/xmpp) ^^
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur.


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Re: Fedora 32 System-Wide Change proposal: Drop Optical Media Release Criterion

[John M. Harris Jr]

On Tuesday, December 17, 2019 7:51:38 PM MST Solomon Peachy wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 17, 2019 at 07:33:12PM -0600, Chris Adams wrote:
> > Again, you're projecting from an anecdote of one.  My anecdote of one is
> > that the vast majority of system in my company (around 400 employees
> > IIRC) don't have an optical drive.  I'm actually not sure if any of the
> > desktops have one (since every once in a while someone will come around
> 
> None of the IT-department-provided systems at my last two employers came
> with optical drives, and even if requested it would have been fulfilled
> in the form of a portable USB drive sent along separately.
> 
> "Enterprises" tend to refresh their equipment every three years or so,
> and it's been nearly two full refresh cycles since CD drives were
> considered standard equipment for end-user systems. It's been even
> longer for servers; after all, why waste the money and physical space on
> an optical drive that will only be used once?

I'd agree, in most environments, most end user systems are generally refreshed 
in a timeline under 5 years. For servers, it varies from under 10 years to 
never. There is definitely hardware that never gets updated though, even if 
the OS is updated, or re-installed.

It's simply not the case that optical drives have been uncommon on end-user 
systems for over 6 years. As we found earlier in this thread, they're on 1/3rd 
of stock desktops from a standard consumer vendor, and on most systems that 
are sold to enterprise customers as designed to run RHEL, at least from one of 
the major vendors of enterprise hardware.

> Granted, there's a long tail of older equipment that was
> shipped/equipped with a CD drive, but let's be honest, you'd have to go
> back more than a decade to find something that can't also boot off a USB
> stick -- placing one firmly in the territory where performance,
> operating costs, and especially reliability of that old equipment is of
> significant concern.

This is simply not the case. Please see the earlier posts in this thread on 
that topic for just a few examples. It's certainly true that newer pre-built 
systems are less likely to come with an optical drive stock. That said, Fedora 
runs on much more than just systems produced within the last 10 years. For 
example, the laptop I'm using to send this message is now 11 years old. All of 
my personal servers are between 9 and 12 years old. These all run Fedora, 
without issue. I'm definitely not the only one running Fedora on "old" 
hardware.

> (FWIW, I have Fedora installed on two such systems, and yes, their
>  reliability has taken a significant nosedive..)
How so? Do you believe it's an issue with Fedora, or with the systems 
themselves? I'd be happy to help you diagnose this off-list, or on the users 
list.

-- 
John M. Harris, Jr.
Splentity

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Re: Fedora 32 System-Wide Change proposal: Drop Optical Media Release Criterion

[John M. Harris Jr]

On Tuesday, December 17, 2019 6:33:12 PM MST Chris Adams wrote:
> Once upon a time, John M. Harris Jr  said:
> 
> > On Tuesday, December 17, 2019 10:02:42 AM MST Justin W. Flory wrote:
> > 
> > > This might not affect people **using** Fedora for enterprise purposes
> > 
> > 
> > Well, this definitely affects those using Fedora for enterprise purposes.
> > It's  incredible how much businesses still rely on optical media for
> > these things.
> 
> Again, you're projecting from an anecdote of one.  My anecdote of one is
> that the vast majority of system in my company (around 400 employees
> IIRC) don't have an optical drive.  I'm actually not sure if any of the
> desktops have one (since every once in a while someone will come around
> looking for a USB optical drive, usually to burn something to send to
> someone outside the company).  OS installs (mostly Windows, sigh) are
> done from USB flash drives.
> 
> We had some blank media on the shelf, but I think it got thrown away
> when we moved offices early this year, because nobody actually had a
> drive to put it in.

That's not what I'm talking about. I work for a company of ~18,000 employees, 
and the vast majority of systems do have optical drives. However, that doesn't 
matter.

As you noted about "to send someone outside of the company", enterprise 
customers still use optical media a lot more than you might expect. For 
example, recently I've been asked to maintain a RHEL install disk with 
packages from epel and a custom kickstart, for re-installs when my team isn't 
available.

In environments where you can do it, I'd strongly recommend using a PXE server 
when deploying large numbers of systems, which I'd personally describe as any 
environment with over 10 systems.

-- 
John M. Harris, Jr.
Splentity

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Re: Fedora 32 System-Wide Change proposal: Drop Optical Media Release Criterion

[Solomon Peachy]

On Tue, Dec 17, 2019 at 07:33:12PM -0600, Chris Adams wrote:
> Again, you're projecting from an anecdote of one.  My anecdote of one is
> that the vast majority of system in my company (around 400 employees
> IIRC) don't have an optical drive.  I'm actually not sure if any of the
> desktops have one (since every once in a while someone will come around

None of the IT-department-provided systems at my last two employers came 
with optical drives, and even if requested it would have been fulfilled 
in the form of a portable USB drive sent along separately.

"Enterprises" tend to refresh their equipment every three years or so, 
and it's been nearly two full refresh cycles since CD drives were 
considered standard equipment for end-user systems. It's been even 
longer for servers; after all, why waste the money and physical space on 
an optical drive that will only be used once?

Granted, there's a long tail of older equipment that was 
shipped/equipped with a CD drive, but let's be honest, you'd have to go 
back more than a decade to find something that can't also boot off a USB 
stick -- placing one firmly in the territory where performance, 
operating costs, and especially reliability of that old equipment is of 
significant concern.

(FWIW, I have Fedora installed on two such systems, and yes, their 
 reliability has taken a significant nosedive..)

 - Solomon
-- 
Solomon Peachy pizza at shaftnet dot org
High Springs, FL  ^^ (email/xmpp) ^^
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur.


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Re: Fedora 32 System-Wide Change proposal: Drop Optical Media Release Criterion

[Chris Adams]

Once upon a time, John M. Harris Jr  said:
> On Tuesday, December 17, 2019 10:02:42 AM MST Justin W. Flory wrote:
> > This might not affect people **using** Fedora for enterprise purposes
> 
> Well, this definitely affects those using Fedora for enterprise purposes. 
> It's 
> incredible how much businesses still rely on optical media for these things.

Again, you're projecting from an anecdote of one.  My anecdote of one is
that the vast majority of system in my company (around 400 employees
IIRC) don't have an optical drive.  I'm actually not sure if any of the
desktops have one (since every once in a while someone will come around
looking for a USB optical drive, usually to burn something to send to
someone outside the company).  OS installs (mostly Windows, sigh) are
done from USB flash drives.

We had some blank media on the shelf, but I think it got thrown away
when we moved offices early this year, because nobody actually had a
drive to put it in.
-- 
Chris Adams 
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Re: Fedora 32 System-Wide Change proposal: Drop Optical Media Release Criterion

[John M. Harris Jr]

On Tuesday, December 17, 2019 10:02:42 AM MST Justin W. Flory wrote:
> This might not affect people **using** Fedora for enterprise purposes

Well, this definitely affects those using Fedora for enterprise purposes. It's 
incredible how much businesses still rely on optical media for these things.

-- 
John M. Harris, Jr.
Splentity

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Re: Fedora 32 System-Wide Change proposal: Drop Optical Media Release Criterion

[John M. Harris Jr]

On Tuesday, December 17, 2019 1:09:17 AM MST Frantisek Zatloukal wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 17, 2019 at 2:31 AM Adam Williamson 
> wrote:
> > Still, we have F32 Beta coming up quite
> > soon, we could potentially delay this feature and see how that goes -
> > see if anyone besides RH Fedora QE staff shows up to run the tests...
> 
> We still can have optical media as non blocking, that doesn't prevent
> anybody testing it and filling wiki page with results.

But it would mean that Fedora would potentially release with optical boot 
broken.

-- 
John M. Harris, Jr.
Splentity

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Re: Fedora 32 System-Wide Change proposal: Drop Optical Media Release Criterion

[John M. Harris Jr]

On Tuesday, December 17, 2019 2:33:06 AM MST Kamil Paral wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 17, 2019 at 12:23 AM John M. Harris Jr 
> 
> wrote:
> > > We have 2 release-blocking media, so the total time is somewhere between
> > > 2-3 hours (likely closer to 2 hours, because netinst installation is way
> > > faster due to downloading packages from the net instead of copying them
> > > from the disc). That's not the main problem, though. The main problem is
> > > that during that time, one or two of our test machines in our office is
> > > fully occupied with spinning the discs, and we can't use it for anything
> > > else. That means all other bare-metal testing needs to wait. As Adam
> > > already pointed out, sometimes we need to check the final candidate
> > > composes in a single day, i.e. in the standard 8 working hours (and yes,
> > 
> > we
> > 
> > > often work overtime in these cases). Blocking half of our bare-metal
> > 
> > office
> > 
> > > test machines for 2 hours out of 8 is not a small deal.
> > 
> > Do you need more test hardware? Honestly, that's what this sounds like.
> 
> Not really. Our office cubicle is unfortunately not inflatable. We have 2-3
> dedicated bare-metal test machines available during the test cycle, and we
> can't really fit any more.
> 
> > > It's simple to say "no user interaction is required", but that's not
> > > completely true either. If you want to do the QA job properly, you need
> > 
> > to
> > 
> > > have an eye on the media consistency check, because we've had issues in
> > 
> > the
> > 
> > > past where it timed out and either considered it a pass or fail (both
> > > are
> > > incorrect). So you can't simply walk away and come back and consider it
> > 
> > OK
> > 
> > > when it reached the installer, you really need to watch the progress in
> > > certain critical points. Once the UI is ready, it is much slower than
> > 
> > when
> > 
> > > booting from USB. So you often spend 10, 20 seconds staring at the
> > > screen
> > > until it decides to do something.
> > 
> > Is that due to the hardware under test, or is it a result of scratched
> > media?
> 
> Due to the fact that optical media are just glacially slow. I don't know if
> you have ever tried Workstation Live from a fast USB3 media, but the
> difference is night and day.

Optical media is not *that* slow though. There's certainly a difference, but 
optical isn't so slow that you have to stare at a blank screen while it loads.

-- 
John M. Harris, Jr.
Splentity

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Re: Fedora 32 System-Wide Change proposal: Drop Optical Media Release Criterion

[Adam Williamson]

On Tue, 2019-12-17 at 20:53 +0100, Ralf Corsepius wrote:
> 
> > To me it is, in a weird way: I tend to view the presence of someone
> > who's willing to actually *do* something as a proxy for there being
> > others who care about it. For instance on the 32-bit x86 topic - if the
> > x86 SIG had *worked* and we'd had one or two people who really cared
> > about it show up to do the work, like we have for ARM or ppc64, I'd
> > have been more inclined to believe there were more people out there who
> > really needed to run Fedora on 32-bit x86.
> 
>  From my perspective, you are twisting reality. The 32-bit x86 sig never 
> had a chance, because it was clear to everybody involved, RHAT wanted to 
> kill it and because everybody @RH proactively worked against any attempt 
>   to support it.

Um. So those times I found bugs specific to 32-bit x86 and mailed the
list about them, that was me proactively working against any attempt to
support it? That's funny, that's not how it felt at the time.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | XMPP: adamw AT happyassassin . net
http://www.happyassassin.net
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Re: Fedora 32 System-Wide Change proposal: Drop Optical Media Release Criterion

[Ralf Corsepius]

On 12/17/19 5:14 PM, Adam Williamson wrote:

On Tue, 2019-12-17 at 10:43 +0100, Kamil Paral wrote:

On Tue, Dec 17, 2019 at 2:31 AM Adam Williamson 
wrote:


On Mon, 2019-12-16 at 16:52 -0700, John M. Harris Jr wrote:

I've offered to take on responsibility for these tests in this thread,

and I'm

still open to that. This is still important to many users, and I'm more

than

happy to volunteer my time to support those users.


If we can actually rely on you to show up and do these tests - within,
remember, sometimes a very short time frame - that'd be great. However,
we've gone through this loop before with some other criteria (we
propose dropping them, someone complains and promises to do the
testing, then doesn't actually do it in the end) enough times that we'd
be a bit cautious about this. Still, we have F32 Beta coming up quite
soon, we could potentially delay this feature and see how that goes -
see if anyone besides RH Fedora QE staff shows up to run the tests...



I think having community help with optical testing shouldn't really affect
the outcome of the proposal. We claim that the importance of optical media
has diminished and it's now below the threshold for granting it a
release-blocking status. That's not really affected by whom executes the
tests.


To me it is, in a weird way: I tend to view the presence of someone
who's willing to actually *do* something as a proxy for there being
others who care about it. For instance on the 32-bit x86 topic - if the
x86 SIG had *worked* and we'd had one or two people who really cared
about it show up to do the work, like we have for ARM or ppc64, I'd
have been more inclined to believe there were more people out there who
really needed to run Fedora on 32-bit x86.


From my perspective, you are twisting reality. The 32-bit x86 sig never 
had a chance, because it was clear to everybody involved, RHAT wanted to 
kill it and because everybody @RH proactively worked against any attempt 
 to support it.



So if the question is "do people really want Fedora on physical optical
disc?", I'm more likely to believe the answer is 'yes' if one or two of
them shows up to actually test it...
I am definitely for "keeping optical media". But because of the lessons 
learnt from how RHAT behaved in the i386-shoting and on the modules 
crap, I am not expecting RHAT nor FESCO to listen nor to care.


Now think about, why Fedora is loosing users.

Ralf
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Re: Fedora 32 System-Wide Change proposal: Drop Optical Media Release Criterion

[Adam Williamson]

On Tue, 2019-12-17 at 16:25 +, Justin W. Flory wrote:
> > 
> > Note, the testing isn't *hard* to do, really, it's just tedious and
> > time consuming. Not just the act of running the test (though that does
> > take quite a while, between the burning process and the boot, media
> > check and install itself), but the fact that it means we need to ensure
> > we have at least a couple of people who still have access to a DVD
> > burner and blank media.
> 
> I'm warming up to an idea that focuses on empowering the community to
> lead this work in a sustainable way without mandating the QA team to
> test these every release. If I could suggest first steps to one way
> to "hand-off" to the community, it might be like this:
> 
> 1. Publish "Fedora QA test cases" somewhere in the Fedora Docs site
> for QA: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/qa-docs/
> 2. Write test cases based on the manual work done currently and how
> to validate success; publish in docs site
> 3. Write Community Blog post to point out to community that these
> docs exist
> 
> If you (or anyone) doesn't like my idea, I encourage you to propose
> what you think would work. :) I believe there is a winning solution
> where the QA team is relieved of tedious work among increasing
> demands, and the distributed Fedora user community does not enter a
> frenzy when they find out optical drives are "unsupported".

Um. I realize these are the avenues you're familiar with, but we
already have a perfectly good, community-facing validation process. We
already have test cases. They're written and they work. They're in the
wiki not on the docs site; this is not a problem, they are both web
pages that community members can visit. (The wiki also has extensive
dynamic templating capabilities which the test cases use frequently;
the docs site...doesn't).

Basically: what's wrong with
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Test_Results:Current_Installation_Test
and
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/QA:Testcase_Boot_default_install
(the test case it links to, for this area) that you think we can fix by
moving the test cases to the docs site and somehow rewriting them (? -
I really don't know what step 2 means).
-- 
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Re: Fedora 32 System-Wide Change proposal: Drop Optical Media Release Criterion

[Justin W. Flory]

> Kamil wrote:
> 
> This has been a long discussion. Let me sum up some answers and
> misunderstandings, as a member of the QA team.
> 

Hey Kamil, I wanted to say thanks for adding this perspective. I missed this 
post in my last reply because there are a lot of posts. I learned a lot about 
Fedora QA reading this just now. :)

> To reply to Justin Flory about Fedora Mindshare Committee - I think this is
> more of an engineering decision, really. Of course you'll find users who
> will want optical boot 100% supported (and that's true probably about
> anything). The question is how much testing we can provide and whether we
> want to block the whole release train on such issues, and that's likely
> just an engineering prioritization. Of course it's good to have user
> feedback.
> 

I think I misrepresented my point by mentioning the Mindshare Committee 
specifically. Instead of it being exclusively an engineering decision, can it 
not be an engineering and community decision? By raising the importance of 
user/community feedback, I don't mean to undermine engineering feedback and 
discussion. But in this specific area (i.e. hardware changes), Fedora has not 
done a good job engaging regions of the world that often have vastly different 
standards of consumer-grade hardware.

This might not affect people **using** Fedora for enterprise purposes but it 
does impact the ability of people like volunteers to **access** Fedora on their 
own machines, especially when contributing guidelines across Pagure projects 
often assume the reader runs Fedora. I think we undervalue the role of older 
consumer hardware because we look at it from an enterprise-demands P.O.V. A lot 
of the feedback that comes into Fedora comes from that perspective. 
Consumer-grade hardware varies more and not everyone has access to the same set 
of resources.

If it feels like I'm harping, it is because there are already some frustrations 
in the non-engineering parts of the Fedora community and my concern is that 
this Change would be one more loss for the volunteer community. For 
perspective, we have existing communities of people in regions who could be 
adversely affected by this Change:

https://communityblog.fedoraproject.org/tag/latam/

https://communityblog.fedoraproject.org/tag/india/

> Regarding Miro Hrončok's proposal "let QA skip testing, but block on it if
> somebody else finds the problem" - yes, it's possible. QA is by definition
> best effort, even though we've considered a full test matrix coverage
> somewhat mandatory lately. We do practice this approach for many criteria
> for which we don't even have test cases written. In terms of boot support,
> though, I'm not particularly fond of it. Without regular QA testing, this
> will have a tendency to get discovered very shortly before Final release,
> and then people will be just mad at QA for not detecting it sooner.
> 

Is it absurd if it blocked an N+1 release? I don't have enough perspective if 
this could reduce the pinch point around a release day while also still 
validating the importance of these issues to the community.

Alternatively, this could make the requirements too complex where few people 
remember this rule in practice.

> If anyone wants to make sure optical media breakage doesn't happen -
> please, help us. We announce new candidate composes in test-announce list
> regularly. Download the image, burn it, install it, and fill out the
> correct field in the installation matrix. Do this from time to time during
> pre-branching period, and regularly for every proposed Beta and Final
> release candidate. We'll be very grateful. And that is independent on
> whether optical media keep being blocking or are no longer blocking. The
> test feedback is always helpful. And if the bugs are on our radar, we'll do
> our best to have them resolved by the final release day.
> 

I wonder what a way of handing these tests off to the community (with some 
guidance from Fedora QA team) might look like.
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Re: Fedora 32 System-Wide Change proposal: Drop Optical Media Release Criterion

[Kamil Paral]

On Tue, Dec 17, 2019 at 5:19 PM Adam Williamson 
wrote:

> On Tue, 2019-12-17 at 13:04 +0100, Kevin Kofler wrote:
> > Neal Gompa wrote:
> > > You've been saying this a lot lately, and this isn't actually backed
> > > up by reality.
> > >
> > > Debian *is* dropping Python 2 support.
> >
> > It was Adam Williamson who claimed that Debian would still support
> Python 2.
> > I neglected to verify that claim, sorry for that.
>
> Actually I didn't. I said "Someone using Debian instead of Fedora
> because they need Python 2..." and "Us dropping Python 2 earlier than
> Debian do". Both of those just refer to Fedora dropping Python 3
> support *earlier than* Debian does. Which is certainly what's going to
> happen, as our last release with Python 2 will go EOL long before
> Debian's last release with Python 2 does.
>

Adam, it's not helping when I ask everybody to move off-topic conversation
to separate threads, but you keep replying to the original one :)
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Re: Fedora 32 System-Wide Change proposal: Drop Optical Media Release Criterion

[Justin W. Flory]

> Miro Hrončok wrote:
> 
> The devel list is the first place where developers gather feedback. The idea 
> to 
> reach a committee (whether FESCo or Mindshare) before reaching to devel is 
> hence 
> entirely wrong in my opinion. Committees should rubber stamp community 
> decisions, not drive them.
> 

I agree that committees should not drive decisions. I did not mean to undermine 
the role of the Devel list in discussing technical ideas and getting wider 
feedback from the development community. I guess there is not an easy 
equivalent of the Devel list to Fedora's non-engineering community.


> As for users communities, yes, that is a good idea. However, so is first 
> discussing this within the engineering contributors community and only once 
> there is a consensus, involve advocacy / user communities for more feedback.
> 

Is there a plan or process for collecting advocacy / user community feedback 
for more feedback?

My concern is this step will not be deemed critical or important enough, and it 
will be glossed over. I'm not opposed to development discussions, but I don't 
see where user community feedback fits into the existing Change process. Maybe 
I am missing something obvious.


> Hence, I disagree with what you say - discussing this on the devel list first 
> is 
> the best thing to do IMHO.

This is not how I wanted to represent my position. I'm sorry to have made it 
appear that way.


> Adam Williamson wrote:
> 
> There is no "why" behind this Change "other than eliminating an
> admittedly tedious task for the QA team". That's the whole thing. There
> aren't any "private RH BZ customer tickets". Why would RH customers
> care about whether or not Fedora blocks on physical optical media
> booting?

The QA team has increasing demands for the ways Fedora is changing, and I also 
understand how optical drives are not part of those increasing demands. But to 
me, there is an opportunity to find a middle ground approach that reduces the 
work for the QA team without causing panic and fear in user communities in 
Global South communities that optical drives will be unsupported.

Also I'm sorry about the "private RH BZ customer tickets" comment. Sometimes I 
am a little jaded as a community volunteer because there are some decisions 
made that I cannot always understand or follow. It was distracting for me to 
mention it here in this discussion and I didn't intend to make a jab.


> Adam Williamson wrote:
> 
> If there are all these thousands of people out there who care deeply
> about the optical media...wouldn't it be nice if some of them turned up
> and helped run the tests once in a while?
> 

It would be nice, but this assumes a lot of the people who are most affected. 
Contributing to Fedora in free time is a privilege. Some companies strictly 
forbid employees from contributing to open source despite using it. Using 
presence of unpaid volunteers as a metric of engagement and interest does not 
match up to me.

That said, I think there is opportunity to improve in attracting contributors. 
If it is important to continue the optical drive validation work, it would be 
cool to see Test Day events or a page in the Fedora Docs sites about how to run 
through the QA tests for optical drive validation. We could rally more people 
to do these things but we have not made a good-faith attempt yet at reaching 
those people and inviting them to the table. I'm not sure where to find this 
test case information myself!


> Very very rarely. As Chris Murphy wrote, by pure coincidence one showed
> up the day before yesterday (to be clear, it has nothing at all to do
> with this Change proposal, the proposers of the Change were not aware
> of that bug until well after the Change was submitted). Before that the
> last time I can find, by searching my Bugzilla mail box for relevant
> words at least, is 2015:
> 
> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1250440
> 
> the last time we had a *fatal* issue that I can find is 2014:
> 
> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1148087
> 
> Note, the testing isn't *hard* to do, really, it's just tedious and
> time consuming. Not just the act of running the test (though that does
> take quite a while, between the burning process and the boot, media
> check and install itself), but the fact that it means we need to ensure
> we have at least a couple of people who still have access to a DVD
> burner and blank media.

I'm warming up to an idea that focuses on empowering the community to lead this 
work in a sustainable way without mandating the QA team to test these every 
release. If I could suggest first steps to one way to "hand-off" to the 
community, it might be like this:

1. Publish "Fedora QA test cases" somewhere in the Fedora Docs site for QA: 
https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/qa-docs/
2. Write test cases based on the manual work done currently and how to validate 
success; publish in docs site
3. Write Community Blog post to point out to communit

Re: Fedora 32 System-Wide Change proposal: Drop Optical Media Release Criterion

[Adam Williamson]

On Tue, 2019-12-17 at 13:27 +0100, Gerd Hoffmann wrote:
> On Mon, Dec 16, 2019 at 09:00:11AM -0800, Adam Williamson wrote:
> > On Mon, 2019-12-16 at 10:49 +0100, Gerd Hoffmann wrote:
> > > Wishlist item:  Can we just have cdn.fedoraproject.org download urls
> > > please?
> > 
> > If you mean 'a URL that redirects you to a mirror that carries the
> > file', that's what download.fedoraproject.org is.
> 
> Well, a redirect does't solve the squid caching issue from my previous
> mail (which you've snipped) as the proxy would still see the different
> mirror hostnames and re-download things when download.fedoraproject.org
> picks another mirror for some reason.

Oh, that's what you meant, I see. Sorry, the thing about proxy
downloading wasn't in the context when I replied so I missed that this
was about that.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | XMPP: adamw AT happyassassin . net
http://www.happyassassin.net
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Re: Fedora 32 System-Wide Change proposal: Drop Optical Media Release Criterion

[Adam Williamson]

On Tue, 2019-12-17 at 13:04 +0100, Kevin Kofler wrote:
> Neal Gompa wrote:
> > You've been saying this a lot lately, and this isn't actually backed
> > up by reality.
> > 
> > Debian *is* dropping Python 2 support.
> 
> It was Adam Williamson who claimed that Debian would still support Python 2. 
> I neglected to verify that claim, sorry for that.

Actually I didn't. I said "Someone using Debian instead of Fedora
because they need Python 2..." and "Us dropping Python 2 earlier than
Debian do". Both of those just refer to Fedora dropping Python 3
support *earlier than* Debian does. Which is certainly what's going to
happen, as our last release with Python 2 will go EOL long before
Debian's last release with Python 2 does.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | XMPP: adamw AT happyassassin . net
http://www.happyassassin.net
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Re: Fedora 32 System-Wide Change proposal: Drop Optical Media Release Criterion

[Adam Williamson]

On Tue, 2019-12-17 at 10:43 +0100, Kamil Paral wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 17, 2019 at 2:31 AM Adam Williamson 
> wrote:
> 
> > On Mon, 2019-12-16 at 16:52 -0700, John M. Harris Jr wrote:
> > > I've offered to take on responsibility for these tests in this thread,
> > and I'm
> > > still open to that. This is still important to many users, and I'm more
> > than
> > > happy to volunteer my time to support those users.
> > 
> > If we can actually rely on you to show up and do these tests - within,
> > remember, sometimes a very short time frame - that'd be great. However,
> > we've gone through this loop before with some other criteria (we
> > propose dropping them, someone complains and promises to do the
> > testing, then doesn't actually do it in the end) enough times that we'd
> > be a bit cautious about this. Still, we have F32 Beta coming up quite
> > soon, we could potentially delay this feature and see how that goes -
> > see if anyone besides RH Fedora QE staff shows up to run the tests...
> > 
> 
> I think having community help with optical testing shouldn't really affect
> the outcome of the proposal. We claim that the importance of optical media
> has diminished and it's now below the threshold for granting it a
> release-blocking status. That's not really affected by whom executes the
> tests.

To me it is, in a weird way: I tend to view the presence of someone
who's willing to actually *do* something as a proxy for there being
others who care about it. For instance on the 32-bit x86 topic - if the
x86 SIG had *worked* and we'd had one or two people who really cared
about it show up to do the work, like we have for ARM or ppc64, I'd
have been more inclined to believe there were more people out there who
really needed to run Fedora on 32-bit x86.

So if the question is "do people really want Fedora on physical optical
disc?", I'm more likely to believe the answer is 'yes' if one or two of
them shows up to actually test it...
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | XMPP: adamw AT happyassassin . net
http://www.happyassassin.net
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Re: Fedora 32 System-Wide Change proposal: Drop Optical Media Release Criterion

[Kamil Paral]

On Tue, Dec 17, 2019 at 1:28 PM Gerd Hoffmann  wrote:

> On Mon, Dec 16, 2019 at 09:00:11AM -0800, Adam Williamson wrote:
> > On Mon, 2019-12-16 at 10:49 +0100, Gerd Hoffmann wrote:
> > >
> > > Wishlist item:  Can we just have cdn.fedoraproject.org download urls
> > > please?
> >
> > If you mean 'a URL that redirects you to a mirror that carries the
> > file', that's what download.fedoraproject.org is.
>
> Well, a redirect does't solve the squid caching issue from my previous
> mail (which you've snipped) as the proxy would still see the different
> mirror hostnames and re-download things when download.fedoraproject.org
> picks another mirror for some reason.
>

Hello Gerd,
this is also off-topic. Please create a separate thread if you wish to
discuss this further (or anyone else). Thank you.
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Re: Fedora 32 System-Wide Change proposal: Drop Optical Media Release Criterion

[Gerd Hoffmann]

On Mon, Dec 16, 2019 at 09:00:11AM -0800, Adam Williamson wrote:
> On Mon, 2019-12-16 at 10:49 +0100, Gerd Hoffmann wrote:
> > 
> > Wishlist item:  Can we just have cdn.fedoraproject.org download urls
> > please?
> 
> If you mean 'a URL that redirects you to a mirror that carries the
> file', that's what download.fedoraproject.org is.

Well, a redirect does't solve the squid caching issue from my previous
mail (which you've snipped) as the proxy would still see the different
mirror hostnames and re-download things when download.fedoraproject.org
picks another mirror for some reason.

cheers,
  Gerd
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Re: Fedora 32 System-Wide Change proposal: Drop Optical Media Release Criterion

[Kamil Paral]

On Tue, Dec 17, 2019 at 1:13 PM Peter Pentchev  wrote:

> > Maintainers need to realize that there is lots of niche software out
> there
> > that is effectively unmaintained (and thus will never get ported to
> Python 3
> > etc.), but that works, fulfills some task, and has no more recent
> > alternative available. What should people relying on such software do?
>
> Either figure out a way to get people to maintain the software, or
> figure out a way to get people to develop a replacement, or keep using
> the unmaintained software on equally unmaintained older versions of
> operating systems that it will run on.
>

Peter started a separate thread for Python 2 discussion (thank you!), so
EVERYONE who wishes to discuss Python 2, please move that discussion into
that thread and out of this topic. Thank you.
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Re: Fedora 32 System-Wide Change proposal: Drop Optical Media Release Criterion

[Peter Pentchev]

On Tue, Dec 17, 2019 at 01:04:43PM +0100, Kevin Kofler wrote:
> Neal Gompa wrote:
> > You've been saying this a lot lately, and this isn't actually backed
> > up by reality.
> > 
> > Debian *is* dropping Python 2 support.
> 
> It was Adam Williamson who claimed that Debian would still support Python 2. 
> I neglected to verify that claim, sorry for that.
> 
> But this means that his argument that users who need Python 2 should just 
> switch to Debian is null and void.
> 
> So far, Fedora has always been one of the few distributions willing to ship 
> legacy compatibility libraries to keep software working. See GTK+ 1, Qt 3, 
> etc. (Some of it, such as Qt 3, was partly my own work, some of it, such as 
> GTK+ 1, has been entirely done by other volunteers.) With the Python 2 
> policy, and also with the package deprecation process that was introduced 
> recently, Fedora is making a radical U-turn, which will make it much less 
> useful for end users. And there is no real alternative to switch to. Debian 
> is clearly not one.
> 
> Maintainers need to realize that there is lots of niche software out there 
> that is effectively unmaintained (and thus will never get ported to Python 3 
> etc.), but that works, fulfills some task, and has no more recent 
> alternative available. What should people relying on such software do?

Either figure out a way to get people to maintain the software, or
figure out a way to get people to develop a replacement, or keep using
the unmaintained software on equally unmaintained older versions of
operating systems that it will run on.

Sorry for the bluntness, but, well...

G'luck,
Peter

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Re: Fedora 32 System-Wide Change proposal: Drop Optical Media Release Criterion

[Kevin Kofler]

Neal Gompa wrote:
> You've been saying this a lot lately, and this isn't actually backed
> up by reality.
> 
> Debian *is* dropping Python 2 support.

It was Adam Williamson who claimed that Debian would still support Python 2. 
I neglected to verify that claim, sorry for that.

But this means that his argument that users who need Python 2 should just 
switch to Debian is null and void.

So far, Fedora has always been one of the few distributions willing to ship 
legacy compatibility libraries to keep software working. See GTK+ 1, Qt 3, 
etc. (Some of it, such as Qt 3, was partly my own work, some of it, such as 
GTK+ 1, has been entirely done by other volunteers.) With the Python 2 
policy, and also with the package deprecation process that was introduced 
recently, Fedora is making a radical U-turn, which will make it much less 
useful for end users. And there is no real alternative to switch to. Debian 
is clearly not one.

Maintainers need to realize that there is lots of niche software out there 
that is effectively unmaintained (and thus will never get ported to Python 3 
etc.), but that works, fulfills some task, and has no more recent 
alternative available. What should people relying on such software do?

Kevin Kofler
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Re: Fedora 32 System-Wide Change proposal: Drop Optical Media Release Criterion

[Peter Pentchev]

On Mon, Dec 16, 2019 at 09:54:49PM -0500, Neal Gompa wrote:
> On Mon, Dec 16, 2019 at 9:37 PM Kevin Kofler  wrote:
> >
> > Adam Williamson wrote:
> > > BTW, there is another point here which you may not appreciate: Fedora
> > > and Debian aren't really in competition. Fedora does not see its job as
> > > being to Conquer The World and have everyone run Fedora. Fedora is
> > > targeted at particular purposes and particular audiences. If a given
> > > feature isn't actually driving Fedora's mission forward in any way,
> > > it's reasonable to consider not having it any more, or at least not
> > > making it a core part of the distribution and subject to blocking
> > > requirements and so on. There comes a point at which we don't need to
> > > support Python 2 for the people and use cases at which Fedora is aimed.
> > > Will there still be people who need Python 2 for *something* at this
> > > point? Probably! But, just as you point out, if so, they can get it
> > > somewhere else.
> > >
> > > Someone using Debian instead of Fedora because they need Python 2 isn't
> > > necessarily a *problem* for Fedora. It's only a problem if it would've
> > > served Fedora's goals and purposes for that person to be using Fedora.
> > > If what they do isn't really a part of Fedora's goals...why should we
> > > worry about them using Debian? Debian is a fine distribution. Nothing
> > > wrong with it.
> > >
> > > To put it another way...Debian and Fedora have different purposes and
> > > different goals. Us dropping Python 2 earlier than Debian do is *things
> > > working the right way*. We (arguably) do more than Debian to drive the
> > > adoption and stabilization of new technologies - new stuff tends to
> > > show up in Fedora earlier than it shows up in Debian. Debian (arguably)
> > > does more than we do to provide long-term support for older software
> > > and support for alternate architectures. This is a *good* thing. It's
> > > an ecosystem that helps everyone.
> >
> > Except that this argument does not match actual facts. Debian is actually
> > pretty aggressive at dropping legacy libraries. Debian has dropped Qt 3
> > several years ago and has already started the process of dropping Qt 4. We
> > still support these and even kdelibs 3 and 4 in Fedora (mostly because I am
> > keeping these alive – it turns out that this is actually very little work:
> > no new upstream releases to care about, just occasionally an FTBFS fix or a
> > security fix to backport).
> >
> > The fact that even Debian is not trying to kick out Python 2 yet shows that
> > it is way too early to even consider it. Fedora is the only distribution
> > insane enough to do such a radical move with draconian enforcement, even
> > over the heads of the maintainers of packages depending on Python 2. (We now
> > need explicit permission to depend on a package, a completely unprecedented
> > and ridiculous move.)
> >
> 
> You've been saying this a lot lately, and this isn't actually backed
> up by reality.
> 
> Debian *is* dropping Python 2 support. As of right now, they are
> working on transitioning to making providing Python 2 packages as
> a bug of serious severity. This means that packages in unstable providing
> Python 2 modules will no longer automatically transition to testing
> and need exceptions to do so. In addition, there's discussion underway
> to make it rc-blocking as well, meaning that packages may not be able
> to transition into testing *without* removing Python 2 support
> *first*.
> 
> While not all of this is implemented just yet in Debian (everything
> moves glacially slow there...), it *is* happening. Debian definitely
> does not want to make another release with Python 2 in the
> distribution. Ubuntu has already decided to filter out all Python 2
> packages from Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, so it's not going to be there either.
> 
> And you know what? This was all made possible by Fedora's work over
> the last several releases to port lots of software to Python 3,
> aggressively migrate to Python 3 by default, and now finally dropping
> Python 2 stuff over the last three releases.
> 
> We may keep the python27 interpreter package for a while, but I don't
> expect us to keep much beyond that.

Right. Must learn to read before posting. Must learn to read the whole
thread before posting.

As a (relatively recent) Debian Developer, I have to say I agree with
everything that Neal said, including the parts about Fedora's work!

G'luck,
Peter

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Debian and Python 2 [Was: Re: Fedora 32 System-Wide Change proposal: Drop Optical Media Release Criterion]

[Peter Pentchev]

On Mon, Dec 16, 2019 at 05:30:14PM -0800, Adam Williamson wrote:
> On Mon, 2019-12-16 at 16:52 -0700, John M. Harris Jr wrote:
[snip]
> > This doesn't change the fact that many Python scripts *cannot run on Python 
> > 3*. Debian is not a museum piece either, and yet they don't just kill the 
> > old 
> > version. The two versions can, and do, work when both installed in 
> > parallel. 
> 
> We are, uh, aware of this. They have been installed in parallel on most
> Fedora installs for like a decade now.
> 
> BTW, there is another point here which you may not appreciate: Fedora
> and Debian aren't really in competition. Fedora does not see its job as
> being to Conquer The World and have everyone run Fedora. Fedora is
> targeted at particular purposes and particular audiences. If a given
> feature isn't actually driving Fedora's mission forward in any way,
> it's reasonable to consider not having it any more, or at least not
> making it a core part of the distribution and subject to blocking
> requirements and so on. There comes a point at which we don't need to
> support Python 2 for the people and use cases at which Fedora is aimed.
> Will there still be people who need Python 2 for *something* at this
> point? Probably! But, just as you point out, if so, they can get it
> somewhere else.
> 
> Someone using Debian instead of Fedora because they need Python 2 isn't
> necessarily a *problem* for Fedora. It's only a problem if it would've
> served Fedora's goals and purposes for that person to be using Fedora.
> If what they do isn't really a part of Fedora's goals...why should we
> worry about them using Debian? Debian is a fine distribution. Nothing
> wrong with it.
> 
> To put it another way...Debian and Fedora have different purposes and
> different goals. Us dropping Python 2 earlier than Debian do is *things
> working the right way*. We (arguably) do more than Debian to drive the
> adoption and stabilization of new technologies - new stuff tends to
> show up in Fedora earlier than it shows up in Debian. Debian (arguably)
> does more than we do to provide long-term support for older software
> and support for alternate architectures. This is a *good* thing. It's
> an ecosystem that helps everyone.

Also, well, Debian *is* dropping Python 2 in its next release:
- https://lists.debian.org/debian-python/2019/07/msg00080.html
- https://wiki.debian.org/Python/2Removal

Many Python 2 modules have been dropped already, many others will be
dropped in the coming months. Yes, there are complications such as
Calibre, but this is, for all intents and purposes, practically
a release goal now.

Sorry for contributing to the more-and-more-off-topic rant, but I just
felt the need to point this out, since I've seen it mentioned a couple
of times recently.

G'luck,
Peter

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Re: Fedora 32 System-Wide Change proposal: Drop Optical Media Release Criterion

[Kamil Paral]

On Tue, Dec 17, 2019 at 4:17 AM John M. Harris Jr 
wrote:

> Sounds good, I'll subscribe to that list when I get to work tomorrow. I'll
> set
> aside a T400 running the standard boot firmware to test optical media on.
> Past
> that, I'll pick out some system that supports UEFI to test UEFI optical
> boot
> on. While I may not be able to test *every* version, I'll make sure to
> test
> every RC, and every nominated nightly compose I can.
>

Great. That will definitely help.
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Re: Fedora 32 System-Wide Change proposal: Drop Optical Media Release Criterion

[Kamil Paral]

On Tue, Dec 17, 2019 at 2:31 AM Adam Williamson 
wrote:

> On Mon, 2019-12-16 at 16:52 -0700, John M. Harris Jr wrote:
> > I've offered to take on responsibility for these tests in this thread,
> and I'm
> > still open to that. This is still important to many users, and I'm more
> than
> > happy to volunteer my time to support those users.
>
> If we can actually rely on you to show up and do these tests - within,
> remember, sometimes a very short time frame - that'd be great. However,
> we've gone through this loop before with some other criteria (we
> propose dropping them, someone complains and promises to do the
> testing, then doesn't actually do it in the end) enough times that we'd
> be a bit cautious about this. Still, we have F32 Beta coming up quite
> soon, we could potentially delay this feature and see how that goes -
> see if anyone besides RH Fedora QE staff shows up to run the tests...
>

I think having community help with optical testing shouldn't really affect
the outcome of the proposal. We claim that the importance of optical media
has diminished and it's now below the threshold for granting it a
release-blocking status. That's not really affected by whom executes the
tests. I'm really interested to know what the community and FESCo thinks
about this, and that's why this proposal is useful.
If we keep blocking on optical media, we'll need to keep verifying it, and
of course any community help will be very appreciated. If we stop blocking
on it, we'll be able to run the test just optionally when we have spare
time, and of course any community help will still be very appreciated.
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Re: Fedora 32 System-Wide Change proposal: Drop Optical Media Release Criterion

[Kamil Paral]

On Tue, Dec 17, 2019 at 12:23 AM John M. Harris Jr 
wrote:

> > We have 2 release-blocking media, so the total time is somewhere between
> > 2-3 hours (likely closer to 2 hours, because netinst installation is way
> > faster due to downloading packages from the net instead of copying them
> > from the disc). That's not the main problem, though. The main problem is
> > that during that time, one or two of our test machines in our office is
> > fully occupied with spinning the discs, and we can't use it for anything
> > else. That means all other bare-metal testing needs to wait. As Adam
> > already pointed out, sometimes we need to check the final candidate
> > composes in a single day, i.e. in the standard 8 working hours (and yes,
> we
> > often work overtime in these cases). Blocking half of our bare-metal
> office
> > test machines for 2 hours out of 8 is not a small deal.
>
> Do you need more test hardware? Honestly, that's what this sounds like.
>

Not really. Our office cubicle is unfortunately not inflatable. We have 2-3
dedicated bare-metal test machines available during the test cycle, and we
can't really fit any more.


>
> > It's simple to say "no user interaction is required", but that's not
> > completely true either. If you want to do the QA job properly, you need
> to
> > have an eye on the media consistency check, because we've had issues in
> the
> > past where it timed out and either considered it a pass or fail (both are
> > incorrect). So you can't simply walk away and come back and consider it
> OK
> > when it reached the installer, you really need to watch the progress in
> > certain critical points. Once the UI is ready, it is much slower than
> when
> > booting from USB. So you often spend 10, 20 seconds staring at the screen
> > until it decides to do something.
>
> Is that due to the hardware under test, or is it a result of scratched
> media?
>

Due to the fact that optical media are just glacially slow. I don't know if
you have ever tried Workstation Live from a fast USB3 media, but the
difference is night and day.
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Re: Fedora 32 System-Wide Change proposal: Drop Optical Media Release Criterion

[Miro Hrončok]

On 17. 12. 19 3:54, Neal Gompa wrote:

On Mon, Dec 16, 2019 at 9:37 PM Kevin Kofler  wrote:


Adam Williamson wrote:

BTW, there is another point here which you may not appreciate: Fedora
and Debian aren't really in competition. Fedora does not see its job as
being to Conquer The World and have everyone run Fedora. Fedora is
targeted at particular purposes and particular audiences. If a given
feature isn't actually driving Fedora's mission forward in any way,
it's reasonable to consider not having it any more, or at least not
making it a core part of the distribution and subject to blocking
requirements and so on. There comes a point at which we don't need to
support Python 2 for the people and use cases at which Fedora is aimed.
Will there still be people who need Python 2 for *something* at this
point? Probably! But, just as you point out, if so, they can get it
somewhere else.

Someone using Debian instead of Fedora because they need Python 2 isn't
necessarily a *problem* for Fedora. It's only a problem if it would've
served Fedora's goals and purposes for that person to be using Fedora.
If what they do isn't really a part of Fedora's goals...why should we
worry about them using Debian? Debian is a fine distribution. Nothing
wrong with it.

To put it another way...Debian and Fedora have different purposes and
different goals. Us dropping Python 2 earlier than Debian do is *things
working the right way*. We (arguably) do more than Debian to drive the
adoption and stabilization of new technologies - new stuff tends to
show up in Fedora earlier than it shows up in Debian. Debian (arguably)
does more than we do to provide long-term support for older software
and support for alternate architectures. This is a *good* thing. It's
an ecosystem that helps everyone.


Except that this argument does not match actual facts. Debian is actually
pretty aggressive at dropping legacy libraries. Debian has dropped Qt 3
several years ago and has already started the process of dropping Qt 4. We
still support these and even kdelibs 3 and 4 in Fedora (mostly because I am
keeping these alive – it turns out that this is actually very little work:
no new upstream releases to care about, just occasionally an FTBFS fix or a
security fix to backport).

The fact that even Debian is not trying to kick out Python 2 yet shows that
it is way too early to even consider it. Fedora is the only distribution
insane enough to do such a radical move with draconian enforcement, even
over the heads of the maintainers of packages depending on Python 2. (We now
need explicit permission to depend on a package, a completely unprecedented
and ridiculous move.)



You've been saying this a lot lately, and this isn't actually backed
up by reality.

Debian *is* dropping Python 2 support. As of right now, they are
working on transitioning to making providing Python 2 packages as
a bug of serious severity. This means that packages in unstable providing
Python 2 modules will no longer automatically transition to testing
and need exceptions to do so. In addition, there's discussion underway
to make it rc-blocking as well, meaning that packages may not be able
to transition into testing *without* removing Python 2 support
*first*.

While not all of this is implemented just yet in Debian (everything
moves glacially slow there...), it *is* happening. Debian definitely
does not want to make another release with Python 2 in the
distribution. Ubuntu has already decided to filter out all Python 2
packages from Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, so it's not going to be there either.

And you know what? This was all made possible by Fedora's work over
the last several releases to port lots of software to Python 3,
aggressively migrate to Python 3 by default, and now finally dropping
Python 2 stuff over the last three releases.

We may keep the python27 interpreter package for a while, but I don't
expect us to keep much beyond that.


Thank You Neal, I was about to say pretty much the same but I could have not 
done it better.


--
Miro Hrončok
--
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Re: Fedora 32 System-Wide Change proposal: Drop Optical Media Release Criterion

[Frantisek Zatloukal]

On Tue, Dec 17, 2019 at 2:31 AM Adam Williamson 
wrote:

> Still, we have F32 Beta coming up quite
> soon, we could potentially delay this feature and see how that goes -
> see if anyone besides RH Fedora QE staff shows up to run the tests...
>

We still can have optical media as non blocking, that doesn't prevent
anybody testing it and filling wiki page with results.
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Re: Fedora 32 System-Wide Change proposal: Drop Optical Media Release Criterion

[John M. Harris Jr]

On Monday, December 16, 2019 6:30:14 PM MST Adam Williamson wrote:
> All you have to do is subscribe to the test-announce@ list and, when a
> mail like this one appears:
> 
> https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/test-announce@lists.fedoraproj
> ect.org/thread/TU5YRBVDQIKUHLZCYVRUMFFPENHL3CPZ/
> 
> Go to the 'Installation' result page - so, for that mail, it would be
> this page:
> 
> https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Test_Results:Fedora_32_Rawhide_20191209.n.0_I
> nstallation
> 
> grab the relevant ISOs (there is a download table at the top of the
> page), test them according to
> https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/QA:Testcase_Boot_default_install , and
> enter your result in the appropriate cell in the 'Default boot and
> install' table. You can do `dnf install relval` then `relval report-
> results` to use a little CLI interface which will edit the page for
> you, if you're not comfortable editing the wiki syntax directly (it's
> quite easy, though).
> 
> It is useful to have results for all the nominated nightly composes,
> but it's *critical* that we get results any time a candidate compose
> appears. Those mails look similar but have a topic like "Fedora 31
> Candidate RC-1.8 Available Now!".

Sounds good, I'll subscribe to that list when I get to work tomorrow. I'll set 
aside a T400 running the standard boot firmware to test optical media on. Past 
that, I'll pick out some system that supports UEFI to test UEFI optical boot 
on. While I may not be able to test *every* version, I'll make sure to test 
every RC, and every nominated nightly compose I can.

-- 
John M. Harris, Jr.
Splentity

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Re: Fedora 32 System-Wide Change proposal: Drop Optical Media Release Criterion

[John M. Harris Jr]

On Monday, December 16, 2019 6:30:14 PM MST Adam Williamson wrote:
> Yup. This was anticipated. What's the alternative? We never drop Python
> 2 support in order to keep software that is clearly becoming
> increasingly out of date in a distribution which has "First" as one of
> its core principles? This is just another angle on "it is almost never
> the case that, when Fedora stops caring about something, it's a thing
> that absolutely nobody and nothing wants". There has to be a cut-off.
> There's probably *someone* out there who still has a Python 1
> interpreter installed. And libc 5. On a 386SX. Should Fedora still work
> on it?

In my opinion, this should be supported, even if stuck at the last version 
packaged, until that version no longer works. If nobody wants to put in the 
work to make the package work at that point, THEN is the time to drop it, in 
my opinion.

-- 
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Splentity

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Re: Fedora 32 System-Wide Change proposal: Drop Optical Media Release Criterion

[Neal Gompa]

On Mon, Dec 16, 2019 at 9:37 PM Kevin Kofler  wrote:
>
> Adam Williamson wrote:
> > BTW, there is another point here which you may not appreciate: Fedora
> > and Debian aren't really in competition. Fedora does not see its job as
> > being to Conquer The World and have everyone run Fedora. Fedora is
> > targeted at particular purposes and particular audiences. If a given
> > feature isn't actually driving Fedora's mission forward in any way,
> > it's reasonable to consider not having it any more, or at least not
> > making it a core part of the distribution and subject to blocking
> > requirements and so on. There comes a point at which we don't need to
> > support Python 2 for the people and use cases at which Fedora is aimed.
> > Will there still be people who need Python 2 for *something* at this
> > point? Probably! But, just as you point out, if so, they can get it
> > somewhere else.
> >
> > Someone using Debian instead of Fedora because they need Python 2 isn't
> > necessarily a *problem* for Fedora. It's only a problem if it would've
> > served Fedora's goals and purposes for that person to be using Fedora.
> > If what they do isn't really a part of Fedora's goals...why should we
> > worry about them using Debian? Debian is a fine distribution. Nothing
> > wrong with it.
> >
> > To put it another way...Debian and Fedora have different purposes and
> > different goals. Us dropping Python 2 earlier than Debian do is *things
> > working the right way*. We (arguably) do more than Debian to drive the
> > adoption and stabilization of new technologies - new stuff tends to
> > show up in Fedora earlier than it shows up in Debian. Debian (arguably)
> > does more than we do to provide long-term support for older software
> > and support for alternate architectures. This is a *good* thing. It's
> > an ecosystem that helps everyone.
>
> Except that this argument does not match actual facts. Debian is actually
> pretty aggressive at dropping legacy libraries. Debian has dropped Qt 3
> several years ago and has already started the process of dropping Qt 4. We
> still support these and even kdelibs 3 and 4 in Fedora (mostly because I am
> keeping these alive – it turns out that this is actually very little work:
> no new upstream releases to care about, just occasionally an FTBFS fix or a
> security fix to backport).
>
> The fact that even Debian is not trying to kick out Python 2 yet shows that
> it is way too early to even consider it. Fedora is the only distribution
> insane enough to do such a radical move with draconian enforcement, even
> over the heads of the maintainers of packages depending on Python 2. (We now
> need explicit permission to depend on a package, a completely unprecedented
> and ridiculous move.)
>

You've been saying this a lot lately, and this isn't actually backed
up by reality.

Debian *is* dropping Python 2 support. As of right now, they are
working on transitioning to making providing Python 2 packages as
a bug of serious severity. This means that packages in unstable providing
Python 2 modules will no longer automatically transition to testing
and need exceptions to do so. In addition, there's discussion underway
to make it rc-blocking as well, meaning that packages may not be able
to transition into testing *without* removing Python 2 support
*first*.

While not all of this is implemented just yet in Debian (everything
moves glacially slow there...), it *is* happening. Debian definitely
does not want to make another release with Python 2 in the
distribution. Ubuntu has already decided to filter out all Python 2
packages from Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, so it's not going to be there either.

And you know what? This was all made possible by Fedora's work over
the last several releases to port lots of software to Python 3,
aggressively migrate to Python 3 by default, and now finally dropping
Python 2 stuff over the last three releases.

We may keep the python27 interpreter package for a while, but I don't
expect us to keep much beyond that.



--
真実はいつも一つ！/ Always, there's only one truth!
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Re: Fedora 32 System-Wide Change proposal: Drop Optical Media Release Criterion

[Kevin Kofler]

Adam Williamson wrote:
> BTW, there is another point here which you may not appreciate: Fedora
> and Debian aren't really in competition. Fedora does not see its job as
> being to Conquer The World and have everyone run Fedora. Fedora is
> targeted at particular purposes and particular audiences. If a given
> feature isn't actually driving Fedora's mission forward in any way,
> it's reasonable to consider not having it any more, or at least not
> making it a core part of the distribution and subject to blocking
> requirements and so on. There comes a point at which we don't need to
> support Python 2 for the people and use cases at which Fedora is aimed.
> Will there still be people who need Python 2 for *something* at this
> point? Probably! But, just as you point out, if so, they can get it
> somewhere else.
> 
> Someone using Debian instead of Fedora because they need Python 2 isn't
> necessarily a *problem* for Fedora. It's only a problem if it would've
> served Fedora's goals and purposes for that person to be using Fedora.
> If what they do isn't really a part of Fedora's goals...why should we
> worry about them using Debian? Debian is a fine distribution. Nothing
> wrong with it.
> 
> To put it another way...Debian and Fedora have different purposes and
> different goals. Us dropping Python 2 earlier than Debian do is *things
> working the right way*. We (arguably) do more than Debian to drive the
> adoption and stabilization of new technologies - new stuff tends to
> show up in Fedora earlier than it shows up in Debian. Debian (arguably)
> does more than we do to provide long-term support for older software
> and support for alternate architectures. This is a *good* thing. It's
> an ecosystem that helps everyone.

Except that this argument does not match actual facts. Debian is actually 
pretty aggressive at dropping legacy libraries. Debian has dropped Qt 3 
several years ago and has already started the process of dropping Qt 4. We 
still support these and even kdelibs 3 and 4 in Fedora (mostly because I am 
keeping these alive – it turns out that this is actually very little work: 
no new upstream releases to care about, just occasionally an FTBFS fix or a 
security fix to backport).

The fact that even Debian is not trying to kick out Python 2 yet shows that 
it is way too early to even consider it. Fedora is the only distribution 
insane enough to do such a radical move with draconian enforcement, even 
over the heads of the maintainers of packages depending on Python 2. (We now 
need explicit permission to depend on a package, a completely unprecedented 
and ridiculous move.)

And this also means that if you need both Qt 3 and Python 2, you are out of 
luck, because Debian refuses to carry the former (for no good reason – it 
takes me absolutely negligible work to keep Qt 3 working, I last had to 
touch it in January) and Fedora refuses to carry the latter (also for no 
good reason).

Kevin Kofler
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Re: Fedora 32 System-Wide Change proposal: Drop Optical Media Release Criterion

[Adam Williamson]

On Mon, 2019-12-16 at 16:52 -0700, John M. Harris Jr wrote:
> 
> Right, my only contributions to Fedora on this account have been Mindshare 
> related, and various Copr builds. I'm not currently a packager, nor am I a 
> member of QA. However, that doesn't change much about my argument. It's still 
> valid, especially in response to the original reasoning given for this 
> Change. 
> If the real reason is simply "The people who currently do it don't want to do 
> it anymore", which is what you describe,
> 
> I've offered to take on responsibility for these tests in this thread, and 
> I'm 
> still open to that. This is still important to many users, and I'm more than 
> happy to volunteer my time to support those users.

If we can actually rely on you to show up and do these tests - within,
remember, sometimes a very short time frame - that'd be great. However,
we've gone through this loop before with some other criteria (we
propose dropping them, someone complains and promises to do the
testing, then doesn't actually do it in the end) enough times that we'd
be a bit cautious about this. Still, we have F32 Beta coming up quite
soon, we could potentially delay this feature and see how that goes -
see if anyone besides RH Fedora QE staff shows up to run the tests...

> > The first time dropping x86 support was proposed, people complained and
> > said they would look after it as an alternate arch, just as we have
> > active teams looking after ARM arches, ppc64le, s390x and so on. An x86
> > SIG was formed. (You didn't join it.) But it barely did anything. Folks
> > in QA and releng followed the process - when x86-specific issues
> > appeared, we flagged them up in an appropriate tracker and notified the
> > SIG about them. But...usually, nothing happened. People *didn't* help
> > fix the bugs. It all just fell on the same people again, most of the
> > time. These are the reasons x86 support was dropped. If you don't like
> > it, that's your right. But there *are* "real reasons".
> 
> I didn't join because I didn't know about it until the followup thread to 
> kill 
> x86 entirely, at which point I did look into the work that was required, and 
> just weeks later x86 was killed. There are real reasons, but it's not the 
> reasons that were actually proposed. Lack of manpower is one thing, but 
> that's 
> not one of the reasons that was cited during the thread.

It's an implied reason pretty much any time the proposal is 'stop doing
this one thing', because if we had infinite resources we'd never have
to stop doing anything. We could do *all the things*. The fact that we
have limited resources is such a basic constraint it's not always
explicitly *stated* in the Change, but it is always there.

> > Python 2 is an even simpler case: Python 2 *is no longer maintained
> > upstream*. The Python developers and the community members and
> > developers who are most passionate about Python's future desperately
> > want projects and users to move *off* Python 2 and *onto* Python 3.
> > Fedora is not a museum piece, it's a living, relatively forward-looking 
> > distribution. A key goal of Fedora is to *drive forward* innovation in
> > F/OSS. Fedora's most important job WRT the Python 3 transition is to
> > push the adoption of Python 3, not to prop up the existence of Python
> > 2. That's not the job Fedora is here to do.
> 
> This doesn't change the fact that many Python scripts *cannot run on Python 
> 3*. Debian is not a museum piece either, and yet they don't just kill the old 
> version. The two versions can, and do, work when both installed in parallel. 

We are, uh, aware of this. They have been installed in parallel on most
Fedora installs for like a decade now.

BTW, there is another point here which you may not appreciate: Fedora
and Debian aren't really in competition. Fedora does not see its job as
being to Conquer The World and have everyone run Fedora. Fedora is
targeted at particular purposes and particular audiences. If a given
feature isn't actually driving Fedora's mission forward in any way,
it's reasonable to consider not having it any more, or at least not
making it a core part of the distribution and subject to blocking
requirements and so on. There comes a point at which we don't need to
support Python 2 for the people and use cases at which Fedora is aimed.
Will there still be people who need Python 2 for *something* at this
point? Probably! But, just as you point out, if so, they can get it
somewhere else.

Someone using Debian instead of Fedora because they need Python 2 isn't
necessarily a *problem* for Fedora. It's only a problem if it would've
served Fedora's goals and purposes for that person to be using Fedora.
If what they do isn't really a part of Fedora's goals...why should we
worry about them using Debian? Debian is a fine distribution. Nothing
wrong with it.

To put it another way...Debian and Fedora have different purposes and
different goals. Us dropping Python 2 earlier than Debi

Re: Fedora 32 System-Wide Change proposal: Drop Optical Media Release Criterion

[John M. Harris Jr]

On Monday, December 16, 2019 12:16:29 PM MST Kamil Paral wrote:
> On Mon, Dec 16, 2019 at 4:06 PM John M. Harris Jr 
> 
> wrote:
> > > An older installation medium can be used and the system upgraded. And
> > 
> > older
> > 
> > > installation medium can be used and pointed at latest installation
> > > repositories (this is not guaranteed to work, but works in majority of
> > 
> > cases).
> > 
> > This is just an excuse for exactly what I said would happen: A release
> > with
> > broken optical install media. This is easily avoidable.
> 
> John, you keep repeating the same arguments over and over. You don't need
> to reply to each and every mail and state your position. If you think that
> being overly vocal will change people's perception of the proposal - I
> don't think so. It might just change their perception of you. We've heard
> you. We understand your position. Please don't spam this thread so hard -
> make it easier for others to read it and participate in it as well. Thank
> you.
> 
> If you care so deeply about optical media working in Fedora, the best thing
> you can do is to regularly participate in testing. Fedora is driven by
> people who work on stuff in areas they're passionate about. This can be
> your area and we'll certainly welcome your contribution. Fedora 32 release
> cycle is coming up soon.

I'd be more than happy to volunteer my time to work on that.

As for "making the same argument several times", that is likely the case, in 
those instances I have recently started referring to the earlier email in the 
thread. That said, when a different context comes up, it makes sense to reply 
to the new context.

-- 
John M. Harris, Jr.
Splentity

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Re: Fedora 32 System-Wide Change proposal: Drop Optical Media Release Criterion

[John M. Harris Jr]

On Monday, December 16, 2019 10:41:57 AM MST Adam Williamson wrote:
> On Sun, 2019-12-15 at 22:59 -0700, John M. Harris Jr wrote:
> 
> > This is not the only change I am referring to. We've been in the
> > habit of dropping things that work, with no real reasons lately.
> > For example, look at dropped x86 support, and soon we will be
> > dropping Python 2. We have already had several Python 2 packages
> > dropped simply because they refused to move to Python 3. This is an
> > ongoing issue, where everything considered "old" is just abandoned,
> > and it is hurting the user base.
> 
> 
> So, as far as I can tell, you have done no work on anything to do with
> x86 support or Python 2: you have run seven package builds, ever, all
> of one package in 2016.
> 
> You also have never run a Fedora validation test (or edited anything on
> the wiki besides your own user space, the Council page to nominate
> yourself, and the 3D Printing SIG page to add yourself).
> 
> According to your badges you've certainly made some useful
> contributions to Fedora in other areas, which is great! COPR builds,
> package tagging, writing articles, running meetings and so on. But you
> haven't actually done any work in any of the areas you're complaining
> about here, as near as I can tell.
> 
> All of the changes you refer to were changes made for the benefit of
> the people doing that work (and *thus* for the good of the project as a
> whole, because the resources of the people who do the work are limited
> and must be allocated properly). You claim that they were done for "no
> real reason", which I think is a symptom of the fact you haven't done
> any of that work, which perhaps makes it harder to understand the
> actual reasons.

Right, my only contributions to Fedora on this account have been Mindshare 
related, and various Copr builds. I'm not currently a packager, nor am I a 
member of QA. However, that doesn't change much about my argument. It's still 
valid, especially in response to the original reasoning given for this Change. 
If the real reason is simply "The people who currently do it don't want to do 
it anymore", which is what you describe,

I've offered to take on responsibility for these tests in this thread, and I'm 
still open to that. This is still important to many users, and I'm more than 
happy to volunteer my time to support those users.

> Upstream authors are caring less and less about 32-bit support in their
> code. This meant Fedora on x86 was working less and less well over
> time, while at the same time sucking up considerable QA, releng and
> developer time. The way Fedora is currently set up, if a package fails
> to build on *any* arch, the entire build fails and is not pulled in. So
> if we needed to fix a problem but the package didn't build on x86, the
> problem wasn't fixed until someone figured out why not, or just blocked
> the package on x86, which over time would have rendered the arch dead
> by stealth. Because we do actually care about what we ship, if a
> compose went on but was entirely broken on x86 we in QA and releng and
> devel would try and figure out why (just as we do for ppc64le, for
> instance) and that was taking up our time too. Building for x86 also
> cost in terms of hardware resources, resources which could otherwise be
> used for building faster on x86_64.
> 
> The first time dropping x86 support was proposed, people complained and
> said they would look after it as an alternate arch, just as we have
> active teams looking after ARM arches, ppc64le, s390x and so on. An x86
> SIG was formed. (You didn't join it.) But it barely did anything. Folks
> in QA and releng followed the process - when x86-specific issues
> appeared, we flagged them up in an appropriate tracker and notified the
> SIG about them. But...usually, nothing happened. People *didn't* help
> fix the bugs. It all just fell on the same people again, most of the
> time. These are the reasons x86 support was dropped. If you don't like
> it, that's your right. But there *are* "real reasons".

I didn't join because I didn't know about it until the followup thread to kill 
x86 entirely, at which point I did look into the work that was required, and 
just weeks later x86 was killed. There are real reasons, but it's not the 
reasons that were actually proposed. Lack of manpower is one thing, but that's 
not one of the reasons that was cited during the thread.

> Python 2 is an even simpler case: Python 2 *is no longer maintained
> upstream*. The Python developers and the community members and
> developers who are most passionate about Python's future desperately
> want projects and users to move *off* Python 2 and *onto* Python 3.
> Fedora is not a museum piece, it's a living, relatively forward-looking 
> distribution. A key goal of Fedora is to *drive forward* innovation in
> F/OSS. Fedora's most important job WRT the Python 3 transition is to
> push the adoption of Python 3, not to prop up the existence of Python

Re: Fedora 32 System-Wide Change proposal: Drop Optical Media Release Criterion

[John M. Harris Jr]

On Monday, December 16, 2019 11:48:49 AM MST Kevin Kofler wrote:
> Adam Williamson wrote:
> 
> > This is not accurate. You're not accounting for the time it takes to
> > write the disc, and we also have to check that the media check works,
> > which takes quite a while on its own.
> 
> 
> Who cares whether the media check works? If it fails, but the distro still 
> installs, that is not a blocker. I remember how, in the early Fedora days,
> it was entirely normal that the media check would always fail and that we
> all learned to just skip it and stop wasting our time on it. (And if it is
> such a time sink, I would argue to just drop it and boot directly to the
> installer.)

Generally, I'd have to agree with this. I have still skipped it in every 
installation I've done, and I'm pretty sure it actually works now.

-- 
John M. Harris, Jr.
Splentity

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Re: Fedora 32 System-Wide Change proposal: Drop Optical Media Release Criterion

[John M. Harris Jr]

On Monday, December 16, 2019 12:52:49 PM MST Kamil Paral wrote:
> On Mon, Dec 16, 2019 at 6:14 PM John M. Harris Jr 
> 
> wrote:
> > On Monday, December 16, 2019 9:56:01 AM MST Adam Williamson wrote:
> > > This is not accurate. You're not accounting for the time it takes to
> > > write the disc, and we also have to check that the media check works,
> > > which takes quite a while on its own.
> > 
> > I was accounting for that time. Writing to a disk and checking it does not
> > take a long time, ~20 minutes at most. This is why I said "less than an
> > hour"
> > in total. Additionally, during that time, no user interaction is required,
> > once the process is started.
> 
> I guess I should provide some better data for those estimated time
> requirements. I haven't used a stopwatch during the last release cycle, but
> my estimate is that it takes 1-1.5 hours to check a single install medium.
> This includes burning the DVD, booting it in BIOS mode including the
> mandatory and default media check, performing the installation, and then
> repeating the boot and install in UEFI mode. Occasionally there are some
> optical reading-related issues, e.g. when a machine gets stuck because it
> constantly spins up and spins down the disc, having a problem trying to
> read some area. Sometimes the disc access gets unusably slow, just to work
> fine after a reboot. All the usual stuff that you come across when using
> CDs/DVDs. Some of that is definitely caused by our rewritable media being
> scratched, or DVD drives being old and the laser no longer being well
> calibrated. We'd have to buy new drives to improve that experience, but I
> don't really see much sense in that, when optical media is a niche
> technology nowadays (hence this proposal).

It is simply not the case that optical media is niche, especially not in 
enterprise installations, low end consumer, business class systems or new old 
stock systems. For example, at $WORK, we use optical media for all 

> We have 2 release-blocking media, so the total time is somewhere between
> 2-3 hours (likely closer to 2 hours, because netinst installation is way
> faster due to downloading packages from the net instead of copying them
> from the disc). That's not the main problem, though. The main problem is
> that during that time, one or two of our test machines in our office is
> fully occupied with spinning the discs, and we can't use it for anything
> else. That means all other bare-metal testing needs to wait. As Adam
> already pointed out, sometimes we need to check the final candidate
> composes in a single day, i.e. in the standard 8 working hours (and yes, we
> often work overtime in these cases). Blocking half of our bare-metal office
> test machines for 2 hours out of 8 is not a small deal.

Do you need more test hardware? Honestly, that's what this sounds like.

> It's simple to say "no user interaction is required", but that's not
> completely true either. If you want to do the QA job properly, you need to
> have an eye on the media consistency check, because we've had issues in the
> past where it timed out and either considered it a pass or fail (both are
> incorrect). So you can't simply walk away and come back and consider it OK
> when it reached the installer, you really need to watch the progress in
> certain critical points. Once the UI is ready, it is much slower than when
> booting from USB. So you often spend 10, 20 seconds staring at the screen
> until it decides to do something.

Is that due to the hardware under test, or is it a result of scratched media?

> The actual installation progress is unattended yet. But you need to check it
> frequently to see whether it finished, so that you don't waste time of the
> bare metal machine standing idle. There are many more tests waiting in the
> queue.

> The fact that this whole process is a major annoyance (it really makes you
> hate optical media, if you deal with this regularly) is of course
> contributing to the fact that we don't want to do it anymore. We're only
> humans. But we wouldn't have proposed the criterion change if we hadn't
> thought the time is right and that it is no longer an important factor for
> the majority of our users. We've waited very long with this proposal. And I
> still intend to keep testing optical media functionality from time to time,
> even when optical-blocking criterion is removed. But I'll do it once or
> twice per cycle, probably with a Beta GO compose, and not for every release
> candidate created.

I'd happily volunteer to help test this, but this is the standard method of 
installing in many environments, and is also the ONLY option in a good number 
of environments as we've described.

-- 
John M. Harris, Jr.
Splentity

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Re: Fedora 32 System-Wide Change proposal: Drop Optical Media Release Criterion

[Kevin Kofler]

Chris Murphy wrote:
> There is nothing sudden about this proposal. It is not unusual. It has
> been laboriously explained. You just don't like what you're hearing.
> And you are resorting to a variety of slander in mischaracterizing
> people's decisions, through your word selection.

You are the one not liking what you are hearing, and hence accusing John of 
producing logical fallacies. But that itself is a logical fallacy, an ad 
hominem attack.

> Conjecture over bugs that do not exist, demanding they will inevitably
> exist, and hyping that some large number of users will be abandoned
> and injured and powerless to do anything about it, is a logical
> fallacy called appeal to emotion.

There is no fallacy there. It is an undeniable fact that not considering 
something a blocker and stopping to test it (the latter being the reason for 
doing the former to begin with) WILL eventually lead to a release shipping 
with that something not fixed. That is the whole point of having blocker 
criteria to begin with.

> The historic facts presented in this thread show this class of bug to
> be rare, and identifiable by virtual device.

No matter how rare it is, if it is not a blocker, it just has to happen to 
happen on release day (on the day of the RC compose, actually) and the 
release will ship with the bug unfixed.

(And no, "has to happen to happen" is not a typo. :-) )

> It is baseless and useless speculation that dropping this release criteria
> will result in undiscovered and unfixed bugs. Is it possible? Sure. Is it
> probable let alone certain? No. That is conjecture.

Your claiming the opposite is conjecture as well. There is nothing 
guaranteeing that it will not happen if you remove the one thing that is 
actually guaranteeing it now (though arbitrary criteria have already been 
put on the blocker enforcement, restricting the images it applies to, which 
(to my knowledge) have not been approved by the maintainers of the affected 
images – that needs fixing, too).

> Is it likely it will affect most of the user base? No. Most of the user
> base does USB based installs.

True, but for something to be a blocker, it does not necessarily have to 
affect the majority of the users, just a sizable portion.

Kevin Kofler
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Re: Fedora 32 System-Wide Change proposal: Drop Optical Media Release Criterion

[Kamil Paral]

On Mon, Dec 16, 2019 at 7:50 PM Kevin Kofler  wrote:

> Adam Williamson wrote:
> > This is not accurate. You're not accounting for the time it takes to
> > write the disc, and we also have to check that the media check works,
> > which takes quite a while on its own.
>
> Who cares whether the media check works? If it fails, but the distro still
> installs, that is not a blocker.


You might not want to speak with such certainty about things you're not
completely familiar with:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_31_Final_Release_Criteria#Media_consistency_verification

If you wanted to say "that should not be a blocker", you're welcome to
propose that change and we'll discuss it, but please do it in a separate
thread.
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Re: Fedora 32 System-Wide Change proposal: Drop Optical Media Release Criterion

[Kamil Paral]

On Mon, Dec 16, 2019 at 6:14 PM John M. Harris Jr 
wrote:

> On Monday, December 16, 2019 9:56:01 AM MST Adam Williamson wrote:
> > This is not accurate. You're not accounting for the time it takes to
> > write the disc, and we also have to check that the media check works,
> > which takes quite a while on its own.
>
> I was accounting for that time. Writing to a disk and checking it does not
> take a long time, ~20 minutes at most. This is why I said "less than an
> hour"
> in total. Additionally, during that time, no user interaction is required,
> once the process is started.
>

I guess I should provide some better data for those estimated time
requirements. I haven't used a stopwatch during the last release cycle, but
my estimate is that it takes 1-1.5 hours to check a single install medium.
This includes burning the DVD, booting it in BIOS mode including the
mandatory and default media check, performing the installation, and then
repeating the boot and install in UEFI mode. Occasionally there are some
optical reading-related issues, e.g. when a machine gets stuck because it
constantly spins up and spins down the disc, having a problem trying to
read some area. Sometimes the disc access gets unusably slow, just to work
fine after a reboot. All the usual stuff that you come across when using
CDs/DVDs. Some of that is definitely caused by our rewritable media being
scratched, or DVD drives being old and the laser no longer being well
calibrated. We'd have to buy new drives to improve that experience, but I
don't really see much sense in that, when optical media is a niche
technology nowadays (hence this proposal).

We have 2 release-blocking media, so the total time is somewhere between
2-3 hours (likely closer to 2 hours, because netinst installation is way
faster due to downloading packages from the net instead of copying them
from the disc). That's not the main problem, though. The main problem is
that during that time, one or two of our test machines in our office is
fully occupied with spinning the discs, and we can't use it for anything
else. That means all other bare-metal testing needs to wait. As Adam
already pointed out, sometimes we need to check the final candidate
composes in a single day, i.e. in the standard 8 working hours (and yes, we
often work overtime in these cases). Blocking half of our bare-metal office
test machines for 2 hours out of 8 is not a small deal.

It's simple to say "no user interaction is required", but that's not
completely true either. If you want to do the QA job properly, you need to
have an eye on the media consistency check, because we've had issues in the
past where it timed out and either considered it a pass or fail (both are
incorrect). So you can't simply walk away and come back and consider it OK
when it reached the installer, you really need to watch the progress in
certain critical points. Once the UI is ready, it is much slower than when
booting from USB. So you often spend 10, 20 seconds staring at the screen
until it decides to do something. The actual installation progress is
unattended yet. But you need to check it frequently to see whether it
finished, so that you don't waste time of the bare metal machine standing
idle. There are many more tests waiting in the queue.

The fact that this whole process is a major annoyance (it really makes you
hate optical media, if you deal with this regularly) is of course
contributing to the fact that we don't want to do it anymore. We're only
humans. But we wouldn't have proposed the criterion change if we hadn't
thought the time is right and that it is no longer an important factor for
the majority of our users. We've waited very long with this proposal. And I
still intend to keep testing optical media functionality from time to time,
even when optical-blocking criterion is removed. But I'll do it once or
twice per cycle, probably with a Beta GO compose, and not for every release
candidate created.
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Re: Fedora 32 System-Wide Change proposal: Drop Optical Media Release Criterion

[Kamil Paral]

On Mon, Dec 16, 2019 at 6:04 PM Adam Williamson 
wrote:

> On Mon, 2019-12-16 at 13:13 +0100, Kamil Paral wrote:
> > It's also important to understand the current state of optical media
> > release criteria. We've dropped the blocker requirement for most
> > installation media two years ago. Only Everything netinst and Workstation
> > Live remained. This proposal suggests that we drop these last two as
> well.
> > If you're concerned about Server DVD or KDE Live or something else -
> there
> > is no change for you.
>
> As per my mail earlier in the thread, I'd suggest this is inaccurate.
>
> Back at the time we reduced the set of tested images, the idea was
> explicitly that we can test just *one* live image and just *one*
> installer image as 'representatives' of the others. If one live image
> boots, we can be fairly sure all live images boot. If one installer
> image boots, we can be fairly sure all installer images boot. This is
> because all lives are built identically so far as boot stuff goes, as
> are all installer images.
>
> This is *specifically* the idea we sold that change on, so it's kinda
> logically invalid to then try and sell *this* Change on "well we only
> test these two images ANYWAY so if you don't use them you shouldn't
> care". It'd be trying to have things two opposite ways.
>

Fair point, that was an invalid argument from my side. Even though e.g.
Server DVD hasn't been optical-blocking for some time, it still gained the
benefits of test coverage or fixes in other media which were
optical-blocking.
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Re: Fedora 32 System-Wide Change proposal: Drop Optical Media Release Criterion

[Kamil Paral]

On Mon, Dec 16, 2019 at 4:06 PM John M. Harris Jr 
wrote:

> > An older installation medium can be used and the system upgraded. And
> older
> > installation medium can be used and pointed at latest installation
> > repositories (this is not guaranteed to work, but works in majority of
> cases).
>
> This is just an excuse for exactly what I said would happen: A release
> with
> broken optical install media. This is easily avoidable.
>

John, you keep repeating the same arguments over and over. You don't need
to reply to each and every mail and state your position. If you think that
being overly vocal will change people's perception of the proposal - I
don't think so. It might just change their perception of you. We've heard
you. We understand your position. Please don't spam this thread so hard -
make it easier for others to read it and participate in it as well. Thank
you.

If you care so deeply about optical media working in Fedora, the best thing
you can do is to regularly participate in testing. Fedora is driven by
people who work on stuff in areas they're passionate about. This can be
your area and we'll certainly welcome your contribution. Fedora 32 release
cycle is coming up soon.
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Re: Fedora 32 System-Wide Change proposal: Drop Optical Media Release Criterion

[Kevin Kofler]

Adam Williamson wrote:
> This is not accurate. You're not accounting for the time it takes to
> write the disc, and we also have to check that the media check works,
> which takes quite a while on its own.

Who cares whether the media check works? If it fails, but the distro still 
installs, that is not a blocker. I remember how, in the early Fedora days, 
it was entirely normal that the media check would always fail and that we 
all learned to just skip it and stop wasting our time on it. (And if it is 
such a time sink, I would argue to just drop it and boot directly to the 
installer.)

Kevin Kofler
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Re: Fedora 32 System-Wide Change proposal: Drop Optical Media Release Criterion

[Chris Murphy]

On Mon, Dec 16, 2019 at 1:28 AM John M. Harris Jr  wrote:

> This is based on random choice and personal whim, not objective reasoning.
> That there is a process does not mean that the outcome is based on anything
> more than various individuals' personal opinions.

whim
/(h)wim/
a sudden desire or change of mind, especially one that is unusual or
unexplained.

Personal preference, how people and the Project choose to prioritize,
what they choose to spend their time and effort on, is subjective. It
is neither arbitrary nor random, and not whimsical. And it's
inappropriate for you to say it is.

There is nothing sudden about this proposal. It is not unusual. It has
been laboriously explained. You just don't like what you're hearing.
And you are resorting to a variety of slander in mischaracterizing
people's decisions, through your word selection.


> > >This is not the only change I am
> > >
> > > referring to. We've been in the habit of dropping things that work, with
> > > no real reasons lately. For example, look at dropped x86 support, and
> > > soon we will be dropping Python 2. We have already had several Python 2
> > > packages dropped simply because they refused to move to Python 3. This is
> > > an ongoing issue, where everything considered "old" is just abandoned,
> > > and it is hurting the user base. It is clear that is where we're headed
> > > with this Change as well. As soon as these tests don't need to be done
> > > before a release, they won't be done before a release, and we'll have a
> > > release that has broken CD/ DVD images.
> >
> >
> > Why demand that people become emotionally traumatized in advance of
> > fantasy bugs, instead of sticking to facts and logical arguments? You
> > do a disservice to valid arguments in favor of retaining the release
> > criterion.
>
> Emotionally traumatized? Fantasy bugs? I'm afraid that I don't know what
> you're referring to.

Conjecture over bugs that do not exist, demanding they will inevitably
exist, and hyping that some large number of users will be abandoned
and injured and powerless to do anything about it, is a logical
fallacy called appeal to emotion.

The historic facts presented in this thread show this class of bug to
be rare, and identifiable by virtual device. It is baseless and
useless speculation that dropping this release criteria will result in
undiscovered and unfixed bugs. Is it possible? Sure. Is it probable
let alone certain? No. That is conjecture. Is it likely it will affect
most of the user base? No. Most of the user base does USB based
installs.


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Re: EXTERNAL: Re: Fedora 32 System-Wide Change proposal: Drop Optical Media Release Criterion

[Wells, Roger K. via devel]

On 12/16/19 1:07 PM, Andreas Tunek wrote:


Den mån 16 dec. 2019 kl 18:42 skrev Adam Williamson 
mailto:adamw...@fedoraproject.org>>:


Sometimes someone will propose that we've crossed the line when we
haven't, and usually we realize this and the proposal fails (excellent
example: the recentish "x86-64 micro-architecture update" proposal,
which met such universal raspberries it's probably not coming back for
a long time). It's possible that sometimes we get this call wrong,
we're only human. But it's wrong to suggest that decisions about what
we can and can't maintain, test and support are made for "no real
reason" or (as you suggested elsewhere) "arbitrarily". They aren't.
--

Thank you for a very informative and detailed post!

+1
/Andreas


Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
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Re: Fedora 32 System-Wide Change proposal: Drop Optical Media Release Criterion

[Andreas Tunek]

Den mån 16 dec. 2019 kl 18:42 skrev Adam Williamson <
adamw...@fedoraproject.org>:

>
>
> Sometimes someone will propose that we've crossed the line when we
> haven't, and usually we realize this and the proposal fails (excellent
> example: the recentish "x86-64 micro-architecture update" proposal,
> which met such universal raspberries it's probably not coming back for
> a long time). It's possible that sometimes we get this call wrong,
> we're only human. But it's wrong to suggest that decisions about what
> we can and can't maintain, test and support are made for "no real
> reason" or (as you suggested elsewhere) "arbitrarily". They aren't.
> --


Thank you for a very informative and detailed post!

/Andreas


>
> Adam Williamson
> Fedora QA Community Monkey
> IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | XMPP: adamw AT happyassassin . net
> http://www.happyassassin.net
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Re: Fedora 32 System-Wide Change proposal: Drop Optical Media Release Criterion

[Adam Williamson]

On Sun, 2019-12-15 at 22:59 -0700, John M. Harris Jr wrote:
> This is not the only change I am referring to. We've been in the
> habit of dropping things that work, with no real reasons lately.
> For example, look at dropped x86 support, and soon we will be
> dropping Python 2. We have already had several Python 2 packages
> dropped simply because they refused to move to Python 3. This is an
> ongoing issue, where everything considered "old" is just abandoned,
> and it is hurting the user base.

So, as far as I can tell, you have done no work on anything to do with
x86 support or Python 2: you have run seven package builds, ever, all
of one package in 2016.

You also have never run a Fedora validation test (or edited anything on
the wiki besides your own user space, the Council page to nominate
yourself, and the 3D Printing SIG page to add yourself).

According to your badges you've certainly made some useful
contributions to Fedora in other areas, which is great! COPR builds,
package tagging, writing articles, running meetings and so on. But you
haven't actually done any work in any of the areas you're complaining
about here, as near as I can tell.

All of the changes you refer to were changes made for the benefit of
the people doing that work (and *thus* for the good of the project as a
whole, because the resources of the people who do the work are limited
and must be allocated properly). You claim that they were done for "no
real reason", which I think is a symptom of the fact you haven't done
any of that work, which perhaps makes it harder to understand the
actual reasons.

Upstream authors are caring less and less about 32-bit support in their
code. This meant Fedora on x86 was working less and less well over
time, while at the same time sucking up considerable QA, releng and
developer time. The way Fedora is currently set up, if a package fails
to build on *any* arch, the entire build fails and is not pulled in. So
if we needed to fix a problem but the package didn't build on x86, the
problem wasn't fixed until someone figured out why not, or just blocked
the package on x86, which over time would have rendered the arch dead
by stealth. Because we do actually care about what we ship, if a
compose went on but was entirely broken on x86 we in QA and releng and
devel would try and figure out why (just as we do for ppc64le, for
instance) and that was taking up our time too. Building for x86 also
cost in terms of hardware resources, resources which could otherwise be
used for building faster on x86_64.

The first time dropping x86 support was proposed, people complained and
said they would look after it as an alternate arch, just as we have
active teams looking after ARM arches, ppc64le, s390x and so on. An x86
SIG was formed. (You didn't join it.) But it barely did anything. Folks
in QA and releng followed the process - when x86-specific issues
appeared, we flagged them up in an appropriate tracker and notified the
SIG about them. But...usually, nothing happened. People *didn't* help
fix the bugs. It all just fell on the same people again, most of the
time. These are the reasons x86 support was dropped. If you don't like
it, that's your right. But there *are* "real reasons".

Python 2 is an even simpler case: Python 2 *is no longer maintained
upstream*. The Python developers and the community members and
developers who are most passionate about Python's future desperately
want projects and users to move *off* Python 2 and *onto* Python 3.
Fedora is not a museum piece, it's a living, relatively forward-looking 
distribution. A key goal of Fedora is to *drive forward* innovation in
F/OSS. Fedora's most important job WRT the Python 3 transition is to
push the adoption of Python 3, not to prop up the existence of Python
2. That's not the job Fedora is here to do.

Again, maintaining Python 2 support is not free, and becomes
increasingly costly over time. Python is an ecosystem, bits depend on
other bits; if we hold some of it back to support Python 2 we hurt
other bits that want to move forward to Python 3. As upstreams
increasingly adopt 3 and either intentionally use features of 3 that
don't work in 2, or just stop testing their code on 2 and
unintentionally introduce 3-isms, it becomes increasingly hard to ship
new versions while still working on 2; this is work that falls on the
packagers, it is not free. Time they spend doing that is time they
don't spend otherwise improving the package or other packages.

With optical media: as I mentioned in another post, your '25 minutes'
estimate for running an optical media boot test is substantially off,
it is closer to an hour factoring in time to write the medium and run
the consistency check. That may not sound like a lot, but we frequently
produce release candidates less than 48 hours before we intend to sign
off on them. (Sometimes we have done it less than *24* hours before we
signed off). In the context of us having less than 48 hours to test the
entire rele

Re: Fedora 32 System-Wide Change proposal: Drop Optical Media Release Criterion

[John M. Harris Jr]

On Monday, December 16, 2019 9:56:01 AM MST Adam Williamson wrote:
> This is not accurate. You're not accounting for the time it takes to
> write the disc, and we also have to check that the media check works,
> which takes quite a while on its own.

I was accounting for that time. Writing to a disk and checking it does not 
take a long time, ~20 minutes at most. This is why I said "less than an hour" 
in total. Additionally, during that time, no user interaction is required, 
once the process is started.

-- 
John M. Harris, Jr.
Splentity

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Re: Fedora 32 System-Wide Change proposal: Drop Optical Media Release Criterion

[Neal Gompa]

On Mon, Dec 16, 2019 at 6:45 AM Kevin Kofler  wrote:
>
> Chris Murphy wrote:
> > On Sun, Dec 15, 2019 at 7:37 PM John M. Harris Jr 
> > wrote:
> >> It's certainly true that Apple will not service your hardware if you've
> >> got an OS other than their proprietary nonsense installed.
> >
> > In no way is it true, let alone certainly true.
> >
> > They've explicitly supported Windows (i.e. not their proprietary
> > nonsense) on Macs for 13 years via Boot Camp. Software they include in
> > default installations of macOS. I've had Fedora on Macs for many
> > years, including on one sent for service and they didn't care.
>
> I guess the main difference is whether you install Fedora as a dual boot
> next to macOS (semi-supported with Boot Camp – they don't really support
> anything other than Windows, but it will not void your warranty) or whether
> you wipe macOS and install Fedora on the whole disk. I assume that the
> latter is more likely to lead to them refusing to service the machine,
> though I don't know anybody who tried that.
>

I did this. They service my hardware if I can prove it's a hardware
fault. It's not that different from other OEMs in that regard.

I have a MacBook that has only Fedora on it and another that has a
dual-boot with macOS. Apple is fine with both.


-- 
真実はいつも一つ！/ Always, there's only one truth!
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Re: Fedora 32 System-Wide Change proposal: Drop Optical Media Release Criterion

[Adam Williamson]

On Mon, 2019-12-16 at 13:13 +0100, Kamil Paral wrote:
> It's also important to understand the current state of optical media
> release criteria. We've dropped the blocker requirement for most
> installation media two years ago. Only Everything netinst and Workstation
> Live remained. This proposal suggests that we drop these last two as well.
> If you're concerned about Server DVD or KDE Live or something else - there
> is no change for you.

As per my mail earlier in the thread, I'd suggest this is inaccurate.

Back at the time we reduced the set of tested images, the idea was
explicitly that we can test just *one* live image and just *one*
installer image as 'representatives' of the others. If one live image
boots, we can be fairly sure all live images boot. If one installer
image boots, we can be fairly sure all installer images boot. This is
because all lives are built identically so far as boot stuff goes, as
are all installer images.

This is *specifically* the idea we sold that change on, so it's kinda
logically invalid to then try and sell *this* Change on "well we only
test these two images ANYWAY so if you don't use them you shouldn't
care". It'd be trying to have things two opposite ways.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
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Re: Fedora 32 System-Wide Change proposal: Drop Optical Media Release Criterion

[Adam Williamson]

On Mon, 2019-12-16 at 10:49 +0100, Gerd Hoffmann wrote:
> 
> Wishlist item:  Can we just have cdn.fedoraproject.org download urls
> please?

If you mean 'a URL that redirects you to a mirror that carries the
file', that's what download.fedoraproject.org is.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
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Re: Fedora 32 System-Wide Change proposal: Drop Optical Media Release Criterion

[Adam Williamson]

On Sun, 2019-12-15 at 20:48 -0700, John M. Harris Jr wrote:
> Instead of trying to make arguments against those who use CDs, why not keep 
> 
> what already works maintained? The level of effort required here is 
> 
> surprisingly small, testing installation from a physical CD takes, with a 
> SATA 
> 
> II connection to a hard drive, approximately 25 minutes, and only ~2 minutes 
> 
> of that require user interaction.

This is not accurate. You're not accounting for the time it takes to
write the disc, and we also have to check that the media check works,
which takes quite a while on its own.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
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Re: Fedora 32 System-Wide Change proposal: Drop Optical Media Release Criterion

[John M. Harris Jr]

On Monday, December 16, 2019 5:13:11 AM MST Kamil Paral wrote:
> It's very important to understand that dropping a release criterion for
> optical boot doesn't mean Fedora can't be installed from a DVD in the
> future. The bugs that affect just bare-metal optical booting (and not
> virtual machines or usb booting) are very rare.

Sure, but it still happens, and it's low hanging fruit to make sure it works 
so that these users don't wind up unable to install Fedora.

> Adam and Chris have provided some numbers and references. If such a
> problem is detected soon enough, we will definitely do our best to make
> sure it's resolved by the official release time.

Where are these numbers and references?

> In the worst case scenario, where no one spotted it in advance and all
> installation media are affected, there are still avenues for affected users.

Like what? Anything that the end user will actually go through the trouble of? 
Put on your user hat for a minute here. You want to install Fedora. You've got 
a system that will only boot via CD/DVD, and a DVD that won't boot. What do 
you do?

> An older installation medium can be used and the system upgraded. And older
> installation medium can be used and pointed at latest installation
> repositories (this is not guaranteed to work, but works in majority of 
cases).

This is just an excuse for exactly what I said would happen: A release with 
broken optical install media. This is easily avoidable.

> And we can also spin up unofficial install media post-release, once
> the bug is fixed (we've done this in the past). There are even community
> members who do these "media refreshes" regularly. Overall, yes, it might be
> uncomfortable if you have such hardware, but it's *not* game over.

Considering that the other major options still have working optical install 
media, it basically is game over. These users would likely flock to a distro 
that isn't supporting their primary install method anymore, such as openSUSE, 
Ubuntu or Debian.

-- 
John M. Harris, Jr.
Splentity

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Re: Fedora 32 System-Wide Change proposal: Drop Optical Media Release Criterion

[Solomon Peachy]

On Mon, Dec 16, 2019 at 09:19:55AM +0100, Lukas Brabec wrote:
> The oldest laptops I have experience with are HP 4520s and Lenovo 
> X201i, both from 2010, both support USB boot.

I still have two AMD server motherboards deployed that don't support 
booting off of USB sticks.  But to give an idea of their age, they were 
introduced in mid-2006 and mid-2007, respectively, and saw their final 
BIOS updates in early 2009 and mid-2010, respectively.

The older motherboard should finally be retired (again) after Xmas.  But 
I'll probably stash it in case its replacement gets taken out by a 
lightning strike.  Again.

(As an aside, I discovered the newer one didn't like USB booting when 
 the F29-F30 upgrade I did twelve days ago resulted in a "No Operating 
 System Present" failure to boot, and neither of my Fedora USB sticks 
 worked.  I couldn't find any blank media around the lab, but one of my 
 colleagues had an Ubuntu DVD lying around -- with that, I was able to 
 grub2-install the system back to life...)

 - Solomon
-- 
Solomon Peachy pizza at shaftnet dot org
High Springs, FL  ^^ (email/xmpp) ^^
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur.


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Re: Fedora 32 System-Wide Change proposal: Drop Optical Media Release Criterion

[Kamil Paral]

On Thu, Dec 12, 2019 at 9:40 PM Ben Cotton  wrote:

> https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/Drop_Optical_Media_Criterion
>
> = Drop Optical Media Release Criterion =
>
> == Summary ==
> Proposal to make all Fedora optical media non-blocking. This means
> we'd stop blocking on bugs found during the installation of Fedora
> from optical media (like CDs and DVDs). This doesn't mean that
> installation from optical media would stop working, just that the
> Fedora Release wouldn't be blocked on any issues that can pop up in
> Fedora installation using this method. Installation from USB devices
> will remain blocking.
>

This has been a long discussion. Let me sum up some answers and
misunderstandings, as a member of the QA team.

The sole reason for the proposal is that testing optical media is a long
and tedious process and we believe that their importance has gone down
massively in the last years. We understand that there are people whose
hardware still requires optical media for installation. There will always
be people like that, even in 10 years. And we don't revel in presenting
them with additional obstacles. But we also have duties, priorities and
limited resources, and must regularly re-assess what we do. In our opinion,
optical media have fallen below the cut-off line. Especially with the
recent deprecation of i386 architecture in terms of kernel/boot support, we
assume that the number of affected hardware and people is just a very small
minority in our user base. That's why we want to drop the release-blocking
requirement and invest the time into testing something that affects more
people.

It's very important to understand that dropping a release criterion for
optical boot doesn't mean Fedora can't be installed from a DVD in the
future. The bugs that affect just bare-metal optical booting (and not
virtual machines or usb booting) are very rare. Adam and Chris have
provided some numbers and references. If such a problem is detected soon
enough, we will definitely do our best to make sure it's resolved by the
official release time. In the worst case scenario, where no one spotted it
in advance and all installation media are affected, there are still avenues
for affected users. An older installation medium can be used and the system
upgraded. And older installation medium can be used and pointed at latest
installation repositories (this is not guaranteed to work, but works in
majority of cases). And we can also spin up unofficial install media
post-release, once the bug is fixed (we've done this in the past). There
are even community members who do these "media refreshes" regularly.
Overall, yes, it might be uncomfortable if you have such hardware, but it's
*not* game over.

It's also important to understand the current state of optical media
release criteria. We've dropped the blocker requirement for most
installation media two years ago. Only Everything netinst and Workstation
Live remained. This proposal suggests that we drop these last two as well.
If you're concerned about Server DVD or KDE Live or something else - there
is no change for you.

Regarding virtual machines, you can rest assured that we'll still block on
VMs booting from ISO files mounted as virtual optical drives. If Adam
thinks this is a bit under-defined at the moment, we'll define it properly
as part of this proposal.

Regarding the topic of how many laptops/workstations/servers sell with an
optical drives nowadays - this is completely irrelevant, let's just not
waste time with this discussion. The important topic is how many of
existing hardware can't boot using other means (that would be mostly USB
for laptops/workstations and network for servers).

Also, this is not something that has been announced suddenly. We've been
discussing this for multiple years, and a year ago it was even proposed by
Matthew Miller (Fedora Project Leader). This gets perhaps more visibility
due to being a Change proposal, as we usually discuss QA matters in test or
test+devel lists. And that's fine, we very much appreciate feedback. I'm
just clarifying this is not some shocking news of the year.

To reply to Justin Flory about Fedora Mindshare Committee - I think this is
more of an engineering decision, really. Of course you'll find users who
will want optical boot 100% supported (and that's true probably about
anything). The question is how much testing we can provide and whether we
want to block the whole release train on such issues, and that's likely
just an engineering prioritization. Of course it's good to have user
feedback.

Regarding Miro Hrončok's proposal "let QA skip testing, but block on it if
somebody else finds the problem" - yes, it's possible. QA is by definition
best effort, even though we've considered a full test matrix coverage
somewhat mandatory lately. We do practice this approach for many criteria
for which we don't even have test cases written. In terms of boot support,
though, I'm not particularly fond of it. Without regular Q

Re: Fedora 32 System-Wide Change proposal: Drop Optical Media Release Criterion

[Kevin Kofler]

Chris Murphy wrote:
> On Sun, Dec 15, 2019 at 7:37 PM John M. Harris Jr 
> wrote:
>> It's certainly true that Apple will not service your hardware if you've
>> got an OS other than their proprietary nonsense installed.
> 
> In no way is it true, let alone certainly true.
> 
> They've explicitly supported Windows (i.e. not their proprietary
> nonsense) on Macs for 13 years via Boot Camp. Software they include in
> default installations of macOS. I've had Fedora on Macs for many
> years, including on one sent for service and they didn't care.

I guess the main difference is whether you install Fedora as a dual boot 
next to macOS (semi-supported with Boot Camp – they don't really support 
anything other than Windows, but it will not void your warranty) or whether 
you wipe macOS and install Fedora on the whole disk. I assume that the 
latter is more likely to lead to them refusing to service the machine, 
though I don't know anybody who tried that.

Kevin Kofler
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Re: Fedora 32 System-Wide Change proposal: Drop Optical Media Release Criterion

[Kevin Kofler]

Ryan Walklin wrote:
> Those are pretty vague references to old workstations and servers rather
> than specific make/model. Can you not use a generic rescue DVD/CD running
> something like rEFInd http://www.rodsbooks.com/refind to then actually
> boot from USB? Then you wouldn't have to faff keeping your optical media
> up to date anyway.

Surely that is not an officially supported (by Fedora) boot method and as 
such can also break at any time. And some of the bugs that prevent booting 
directly from optical media will also prevent booting from such a setup. 
(E.g., if it is the fact that there is an optical media inserted that 
confuses the listing of potential target devices in Anaconda.)

> As a tangent. this is pretty annoying, even when installing from USB I
> have to manually go out and grab firmware and NetworkManager packages for
> my laptop. Even worse they seem to be installed on the live images
> themselves and so WiFi works in Anaconda but not in the installed system.

I don't really see how that can happen. The liveinst mode of Anaconda just 
rsyncs everything that is installed on the live image to the target disk. It 
is not going to exclude firmware or any other installed packages. (Not even 
Anaconda itself, despite it not being needed on the installed system.)

Kevin Kofler
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Re: Fedora 32 System-Wide Change proposal: Drop Optical Media Release Criterion

[Gerd Hoffmann]

  Hi,

> Soon after release, weeks, this first update payload is easily the
> size of the Workstation Live ISO. Is it typical to setup a local
> mirror to mitigate this problem?  If it were easier to setup a local
> mirror, or locally mirror a subset of the RPMs in a release, would
> that help make netinstall more viable in addition to making it easier
> to provide up to date installations?

/me has a local Server mirror for VM installs.

Mirroring the Everything and updates repos is too much data.

Mirroring a subset of the RPMs is too much work (maintaining the subset
you need is a PITA because it constantly changes).

What works best is downloading though a caching proxy.  Needs tweaking
the repofiles though:  Comment out metalink, add baseurl with a fixed
mirror instead, otherwise you'll end up re-downloading unmodified
repodata and packages just because yum/dnf picked another mirror this
time.

Wishlist item:  Can we just have cdn.fedoraproject.org download urls
please?

cheers,
  Gerd
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Re: Fedora 32 System-Wide Change proposal: Drop Optical Media Release Criterion

[John M. Harris Jr]

On Monday, December 16, 2019 1:19:55 AM MST Lukas Brabec wrote:
[snip]
> I'm the one who usually does it [1][3][4][5], sometimes it is cmurf [2].

I saw. It's odd that Fedora supports that walled garden environment, though 
that's neither here nor there. The fact that it is actually tested is why I 
didn't follow up.

-- 
John M. Harris, Jr.
Splentity

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Re: Fedora 32 System-Wide Change proposal: Drop Optical Media Release Criterion

[John M. Harris Jr]

On Monday, December 16, 2019 12:20:32 AM MST Chris Murphy wrote:
> First, I haven't claimed it's not getting tested.

Sorry, must have been a misunderstanding on my part.

> Second, you have used a fallacy of circular reasoning. The test is
> being done because it's required to be done. That the test is being
> done is not a supporting fact that testing should be compulsory.

That is simply not the case. The test is being done to ensure that users can 
still install Fedora using optical media.

> That it's usually a full time Red Hat employee doing the testing,
> suggests that this criterion is not important to the community -
> except apparently when it comes time to complain about dropping the
> release criterion.

By "the community", you mean "developers" here? The users just use it. All 
they care about is whether or not it works. They don't want to be involved in 
making sure it continues to work. I've already volunteered to help out in this 
thread. This is important for users.

> > Please see above. Additionally, there is no reason to be hostile about
> > this.
> 
> 
> Please don't waste your time, you can't make me angry.

I wouldn't attempt to do so.

> > That is, by definition, not hyperbole. It was meant to be taken seriously,
> > and is an issue that needs to be addressed.
> 
> 
> I refuse because the word you used has a meaning contrary to the facts at
> hand:
 
> ar·bi·trar·y
> /ˈärbəˌtrerē/
> adjective: arbitrary
> based on random choice or personal whim, rather than any reason or system.

This is based on random choice and personal whim, not objective reasoning. 
That there is a process does not mean that the outcome is based on anything 
more than various individuals' personal opinions.

> This proposal is not based on anyone's personal whim. The change
> process being used are not based on whim. They are part of a rational
> system, one which you are mischaracterizing and prejudging the
> outcome. You do this by claiming the process is random when plainly it
> is not at all random. It has a structure that you merely do not like,
> not that it is lacking in structure.

It is not *random*, but see above.

> >This is not the only change I am
> >
> > referring to. We've been in the habit of dropping things that work, with
> > no real reasons lately. For example, look at dropped x86 support, and
> > soon we will be dropping Python 2. We have already had several Python 2
> > packages dropped simply because they refused to move to Python 3. This is
> > an ongoing issue, where everything considered "old" is just abandoned,
> > and it is hurting the user base. It is clear that is where we're headed
> > with this Change as well. As soon as these tests don't need to be done
> > before a release, they won't be done before a release, and we'll have a
> > release that has broken CD/ DVD images.
> 
> 
> Why demand that people become emotionally traumatized in advance of
> fantasy bugs, instead of sticking to facts and logical arguments? You
> do a disservice to valid arguments in favor of retaining the release
> criterion.

Emotionally traumatized? Fantasy bugs? I'm afraid that I don't know what 
you're referring to.

What I've described is precisely what WILL happen, if this Change is accepted. 
That is precisely what this sets us up for.

> You are pulling off a bandaid on old wounds, making a false connection
> between them and this one, and then appeal to the users as higher
> authority. And it amounts to sadfishing, and doing so on their behalf
> without their permission. I've told you before, I will not participate
> in these attempts at emotional manipulation.

You've mischaracterized my argument as an appeal to emotion. It is not. I'm 
stating what will happen. I'm saying this because it has happened in the past 
with several issues that started out in a similar manner.

> There are many hundreds of bugs fixed prior to each release, and they
> are discovered and fixed by the Fedora community despite no release
> criterion existing.

Additionally, many are not, especially not before the actual release. If this 
is not a release blocker, Fedora WILL have a release with broken CD/DVD 
install media. I suspect that would occur within two releases, though that's 
just my estimate.

-- 
John M. Harris, Jr.
Splentity

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Re: Fedora 32 System-Wide Change proposal: Drop Optical Media Release Criterion

[Lukas Brabec]

I'm +1.

The oldest laptops I have experience with are HP 4520s and Lenovo X201i, both
from 2010, both support USB boot.

Two biggest online stores in Czechia:
- CZC.cz lists 1422 laptops without optical drive, 128 with.
- Alza.cz lists 2223 without optical drive filter, 138 with.

Every autumn, we do Fedora Installfest and I don't even think we met someone
with a laptop that doesn't support USB boot.


On Fri, Dec 13, 2019 at 12:03 PM Miro Hrončok  wrote:
>
> Juts a random idea, not very thought-out:
>
> Could we keep optical media bugs reported by users as blocking, but not 
> require
> it during validation testing?
>
>
> aka: Fedora QE would no longer have to verify optical media works.
> but: If a tester finds an optical media  bug, it is still blocking.
>

Well, not ideal, but if this should be the middle ground we agree on,
I'd be okay with it.


On Mon, Dec 16, 2019 at 5:36 AM John M. Harris Jr  wrote:
>
> On Sunday, December 15, 2019 9:03:06 PM MST Chris Murphy wrote:
> > https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_32_Final_Release_Criteria#OS_X_dual_boot
>
> Thank you, I'll see if anyone actually tests that, and see if we can get a
> Change proposal to drop that requirement if not.
>

I'm the one who usually does it [1][3][4][5], sometimes it is cmurf [2].

[1] 
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Test_Results:Fedora_27_RC_1.2_Installation#Fedora_Media_Writer
[2] 
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Test_Results:Fedora_28_RC_1.1_Installation#Fedora_Media_Writer
[3] 
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Test_Results:Fedora_29_RC_1.2_Installation#Fedora_Media_Writer
[4] 
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Test_Results:Fedora_30_RC_1.1_Installation#Fedora_Media_Writer
[5] 
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Test_Results:Fedora_31_RC_1.3_Installation#Fedora_Media_Writer
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Re: Fedora 32 System-Wide Change proposal: Drop Optical Media Release Criterion

[Chris Murphy]

On Sun, Dec 15, 2019 at 11:00 PM John M. Harris Jr  wrote:
>
> On Sunday, December 15, 2019 9:46:21 PM MST Chris Murphy wrote:
> > On Sun, Dec 15, 2019 at 9:32 PM John M. Harris Jr 
> > wrote:
>
> > > It simply is not where we are now, nor have we been "for a while".
> >
> >
> > Based on what facts? You merely repeating yourself over and over until
> > people give up?
>
> Based on the fact that this actually has been getting tested. You can claim
> otherwise, but that does not make it so. While the idea may have come up, and
> I wouldn't be aware of that, nor would it matter, it is not the case that it
> simply has become the case that it is not done.

First, I haven't claimed it's not getting tested.

Second, you have used a fallacy of circular reasoning. The test is
being done because it's required to be done. That the test is being
done is not a supporting fact that testing should be compulsory.

That it's usually a full time Red Hat employee doing the testing,
suggests that this criterion is not important to the community -
except apparently when it comes time to complain about dropping the
release criterion.


> > The facts are in emails and IRC conversations Adam previously cited in
> > this very thread. This isn't a new problem or concern. And i was
> > involved in those conversations. I'm not making things up and just
> > saying them as if I wish they were true, or as if saying things makes
> > them true.
>
> Please see above. Additionally, there is no reason to be hostile about this.


Please don't waste your time, you can't make me angry.


> > > It is completely arbitrary. It works right now. Testing it requires very
> > > little user time, and only needs to be done after automated tests have
> > > already passed.
> >
> >
> > hy·per·bo·le
> > /hīˈpərbəlē/
> > noun: hyperbole; plural noun: hyperboles
> > exaggerated statements or claims not meant to be taken literally.
> >
> >
> >
> > The change proposal lays out clear subjective and objective reasoning,
> > and the change proposal process includes this now 70 some odd email
> > thread discussion, and it's not yet decided by FESCo. These are
> > objective processes. You calling them completely arbitrary cannot be
> > taken seriously. It's an unserious ridiculous characterization.
>
> That is, by definition, not hyperbole. It was meant to be taken seriously, and
> is an issue that needs to be addressed.

I refuse because the word you used has a meaning contrary to the facts at hand:

ar·bi·trar·y
/ˈärbəˌtrerē/
adjective: arbitrary
based on random choice or personal whim, rather than any reason or system.

This proposal is not based on anyone's personal whim. The change
process being used are not based on whim. They are part of a rational
system, one which you are mischaracterizing and prejudging the
outcome. You do this by claiming the process is random when plainly it
is not at all random. It has a structure that you merely do not like,
not that it is lacking in structure.



>This is not the only change I am
> referring to. We've been in the habit of dropping things that work, with no
> real reasons lately. For example, look at dropped x86 support, and soon we
> will be dropping Python 2. We have already had several Python 2 packages
> dropped simply because they refused to move to Python 3. This is an ongoing
> issue, where everything considered "old" is just abandoned, and it is hurting
> the user base. It is clear that is where we're headed with this Change as
> well. As soon as these tests don't need to be done before a release, they
> won't be done before a release, and we'll have a release that has broken CD/
> DVD images.

Why demand that people become emotionally traumatized in advance of
fantasy bugs, instead of sticking to facts and logical arguments? You
do a disservice to valid arguments in favor of retaining the release
criterion.

You are pulling off a bandaid on old wounds, making a false connection
between them and this one, and then appeal to the users as higher
authority. And it amounts to sadfishing, and doing so on their behalf
without their permission. I've told you before, I will not participate
in these attempts at emotional manipulation.

There are many hundreds of bugs fixed prior to each release, and they
are discovered and fixed by the Fedora community despite no release
criterion existing.

-- 
Chris Murphy
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Re: Fedora 32 System-Wide Change proposal: Drop Optical Media Release Criterion

[John M. Harris Jr]

On Sunday, December 15, 2019 9:46:21 PM MST Chris Murphy wrote:
> On Sun, Dec 15, 2019 at 9:32 PM John M. Harris Jr 
> wrote:
> >
> >
> > On Sunday, December 15, 2019 9:14:53 PM MST Chris Murphy wrote:
> > 
> > > On Sun, Dec 15, 2019 at 7:48 PM John M. Harris Jr
> > > 
> > > wrote:
> > > 
> > > >
> > > >
> > > >
> > > > While that may be representative of "where the market is going", it's
> > > > not
> > > > representative of where we are. Please keep in mind that we support
> > > > far
> > > > more than just the latest generation hardware. We don't support quite
> > > > as
> > > > much as Debian, but we have many users who don't have UEFI, or have
> > > > early
> > > > UEFI firmware, which doesn't support USB boot.
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > > Fedora QA has variably floated dropping the physical optical boot
> > > criterion for at least the past two or three years. In terms of
> > > testing, it's where we have been for a while.
> >
> >
> >
> > It simply is not where we are now, nor have we been "for a while".
> 
> 
> Based on what facts? You merely repeating yourself over and over until
> people give up?

Based on the fact that this actually has been getting tested. You can claim 
otherwise, but that does not make it so. While the idea may have come up, and 
I wouldn't be aware of that, nor would it matter, it is not the case that it 
simply has become the case that it is not done.

> The facts are in emails and IRC conversations Adam previously cited in
> this very thread. This isn't a new problem or concern. And i was
> involved in those conversations. I'm not making things up and just
> saying them as if I wish they were true, or as if saying things makes
> them true.

Please see above. Additionally, there is no reason to be hostile about this.

> > > > This is a good example of what I mentioned about hardware that runs
> > > > Fedora. Many people won't want to replace their hardware just because
> > > > their OS is randomly throwing out compatibility for it, like we have
> > > > been
> > > > prone to do in Fedora recently.
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > > Hyberbole. This is not an arbitrary proposal or process.
> >
> >
> >
> > It is completely arbitrary. It works right now. Testing it requires very
> > little user time, and only needs to be done after automated tests have
> > already passed.
> 
> 
> hy·per·bo·le
> /hīˈpərbəlē/
> noun: hyperbole; plural noun: hyperboles
> exaggerated statements or claims not meant to be taken literally.
> 
> 
> 
> The change proposal lays out clear subjective and objective reasoning,
> and the change proposal process includes this now 70 some odd email
> thread discussion, and it's not yet decided by FESCo. These are
> objective processes. You calling them completely arbitrary cannot be
> taken seriously. It's an unserious ridiculous characterization.

That is, by definition, not hyperbole. It was meant to be taken seriously, and 
is an issue that needs to be addressed. This is not the only change I am 
referring to. We've been in the habit of dropping things that work, with no 
real reasons lately. For example, look at dropped x86 support, and soon we 
will be dropping Python 2. We have already had several Python 2 packages 
dropped simply because they refused to move to Python 3. This is an ongoing 
issue, where everything considered "old" is just abandoned, and it is hurting 
the user base. It is clear that is where we're headed with this Change as 
well. As soon as these tests don't need to be done before a release, they 
won't be done before a release, and we'll have a release that has broken CD/
DVD images.

-- 
John M. Harris, Jr.
Splentity

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Re: Fedora 32 System-Wide Change proposal: Drop Optical Media Release Criterion

[Chris Murphy]

On Sun, Dec 15, 2019 at 9:32 PM John M. Harris Jr  wrote:
>
> On Sunday, December 15, 2019 9:14:53 PM MST Chris Murphy wrote:
> > On Sun, Dec 15, 2019 at 7:48 PM John M. Harris Jr 
> > wrote:
> > >
> > >
> > > While that may be representative of "where the market is going", it's not
> > > representative of where we are. Please keep in mind that we support far
> > > more than just the latest generation hardware. We don't support quite as
> > > much as Debian, but we have many users who don't have UEFI, or have early
> > > UEFI firmware, which doesn't support USB boot.
> >
> >
> > Fedora QA has variably floated dropping the physical optical boot
> > criterion for at least the past two or three years. In terms of
> > testing, it's where we have been for a while.
>
> It simply is not where we are now, nor have we been "for a while".

Based on what facts? You merely repeating yourself over and over until
people give up?

The facts are in emails and IRC conversations Adam previously cited in
this very thread. This isn't a new problem or concern. And i was
involved in those conversations. I'm not making things up and just
saying them as if I wish they were true, or as if saying things makes
them true.




>
> > > This is a good example of what I mentioned about hardware that runs
> > > Fedora. Many people won't want to replace their hardware just because
> > > their OS is randomly throwing out compatibility for it, like we have been
> > > prone to do in Fedora recently.
> >
> >
> > Hyberbole. This is not an arbitrary proposal or process.
>
> It is completely arbitrary. It works right now. Testing it requires very
> little user time, and only needs to be done after automated tests have already
> passed.

hy·per·bo·le
/hīˈpərbəlē/
noun: hyperbole; plural noun: hyperboles
exaggerated statements or claims not meant to be taken literally.



The change proposal lays out clear subjective and objective reasoning,
and the change proposal process includes this now 70 some odd email
thread discussion, and it's not yet decided by FESCo. These are
objective processes. You calling them completely arbitrary cannot be
taken seriously. It's an unserious ridiculous characterization.



-- 
Chris Murphy
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Re: Fedora 32 System-Wide Change proposal: Drop Optical Media Release Criterion

[John M. Harris Jr]

On Sunday, December 15, 2019 9:03:06 PM MST Chris Murphy wrote:
> https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/
Fedora_32_Final_Release_Criteria#OS_X_dual_boot

Thank you, I'll see if anyone actually tests that, and see if we can get a 
Change proposal to drop that requirement if not.

> 
> >It's certainly true that Apple will not service your hardware if you've got
> >an OS other than their proprietary nonsense installed.

> > For laptops. For desktops, it is still a standard offering.
> 
> 
> Literally zero desktops I looked at today, come with optical drives
> standard. Do they exist? I don't doubt they do. But they're far less
> common than the standard prebuilt systems that don't have it. And it
> doesn't even matter because what matters is what the community
> resources dictate for this use case. And the whole impetus behind the
> change proposal is lack of testers.

Again, I don't know where you looked, but that is not representative of the 
systems available today. See the examples found by myself and others earlier 
in this thread.

> > "included in the box" was never my claim.
> 
> 
> A standard method of installing, and yet not included in the box. It's
> a standard way to not install.

You completely ignored what I said, and took part of one sentence. When these 
vendors actually do include installation media at all, it's an optical disk.

> >I don't think Apple has ever included ANY installation media in the box.
> 
> They did for many years. Floppies, CD's, DVDs.

Fair enough, I'll have to take you on your word for that, I've never purchased 
one of those devices. However, from what you've said, it seems that those 
would be optical media as well, in recent years.

> > > Fedora testing can't get more than a couple people to test the optical
> > > release criterion. These days it's typically Adam or Kamil digging
> > > into a supply of DVDs they keep around exclusively for this test,
> > > having no purpose for them otherwise. Overwhelmingly QA testers and
> > > feedback is based on USB stick installations.
> >
> >
> >
> > You make it sound like disks are hard to come by. They're not.
> 
> 
> Indeed, it's the users with optical drives who are hard to come by,
> especially for testing.

Is that actually the case? If so, I'd be happy to ship out an optical drive to 
anyone in need. They're incredibly inexpensive in the US, and I actually have 
a box full of them, both SATA and USB.

-- 
John M. Harris, Jr.
Splentity

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Re: Fedora 32 System-Wide Change proposal: Drop Optical Media Release Criterion

[John M. Harris Jr]

On Sunday, December 15, 2019 9:14:53 PM MST Chris Murphy wrote:
> On Sun, Dec 15, 2019 at 7:48 PM John M. Harris Jr 
> wrote:
> >
> >
> > While that may be representative of "where the market is going", it's not
> > representative of where we are. Please keep in mind that we support far
> > more than just the latest generation hardware. We don't support quite as
> > much as Debian, but we have many users who don't have UEFI, or have early
> > UEFI firmware, which doesn't support USB boot.
> 
> 
> Fedora QA has variably floated dropping the physical optical boot
> criterion for at least the past two or three years. In terms of
> testing, it's where we have been for a while.

It simply is not where we are now, nor have we been "for a while".

> > This is a good example of what I mentioned about hardware that runs
> > Fedora. Many people won't want to replace their hardware just because
> > their OS is randomly throwing out compatibility for it, like we have been
> > prone to do in Fedora recently.
> 
> 
> Hyberbole. This is not an arbitrary proposal or process.

It is completely arbitrary. It works right now. Testing it requires very 
little user time, and only needs to be done after automated tests have already 
passed.

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Splentity

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Re: Fedora 32 System-Wide Change proposal: Drop Optical Media Release Criterion

[Chris Murphy]

On Sun, Dec 15, 2019 at 7:55 PM Ryan Walklin  wrote:
>
> On Mon, 16 Dec 2019, at 1:45 PM, Kevin Kofler wrote:
>
> > The netinstall:
> > * is not usable offline,
> > * in particular, is a pain to set up if all you have is a WPA-protected
> >   WLAN,
> > * or in particular, will not work at all if your WiFi chipset requires a
> >   non-upstream (either proprietary, or not submitted upstream yet, or stuck
> >   in staging) driver,
>
> As a tangent. this is pretty annoying, even when installing from USB I have 
> to manually go out and grab firmware and NetworkManager packages for my 
> laptop. Even worse they seem to be installed on the live images themselves 
> and so WiFi works in Anaconda but not in the installed system.

That sounds like two bugs, each needing their own bug reports:
a. the difference in wifi firmware offerings between netinstall and Live
b. that it works on Live but not once installed from Live (this is an
rsync copy, with an immutable RPM database so it's not likely a case
of missing firmware, maybe some NetworkManager bug or some problem
with a kernel module not loading or a race that only happens on the
installed systems? Needs troubleshooting comparing Live and installed
boots.

Feel free to post URLs for this on desktop@ list.

Some wifi hardware requires firmware with license restrictions
preventing including in Fedora (I'm looking at Broadcom) but that's a
known problem with not many good work arounds.
https://pagure.io/fedora-workstation/issue/116


-- 
Chris Murphy
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Re: Fedora 32 System-Wide Change proposal: Drop Optical Media Release Criterion

[John M. Harris Jr]

On Sunday, December 15, 2019 9:03:43 PM MST Chris Adams wrote:
> Once upon a time, John M. Harris Jr  said:
> 
> > This change is about testing those ISO images, and whether or not those
> > ISO  images are release-blocking. If it's not a valid CD image (meaning
> > it wouldn't boot when put into a real disk drive), it most likely
> > wouldn't work in the virtual CD images.
> 
> 
> No, it is just about not writing those ISO images to physical media for
> testing.  The ISO images will still be blocking deliverables.  Testing
> of ISOs is easy and can be done automated.  Testing of physical media
> requires time.
> 
> 
> > This also doesn't solve anything for the users 
> > that have first or second generation UEFI systems, or those with UEFI
> > firmware  provided by a vendor, that doesn't support USB boot.
> 
> 
> So again, if UEFI boot doesn't work, don't use it?  I tried UEFI boot
> with an early generation, and it had multiple issues, so I stuck with
> BIOS boot for a while longer.  There's nothing in Fedora that requires
> UEFI boot.

I didn't say that anything in Fedora required UEFI boot. For example, none of 
my systems that run GNU/Linux actually have UEFI. However, there are a number 
of systems that don't support booting from USB in UEFI or BIOS, or only 
implement UEFI and not BIOS, or only BIOS and not UEFI but don't have USB 
support. It's not a solution to simply say "Go grab this third party software 
to bootstrap your Fedora installation". Put on the user hat for a minute and 
think about how this actually affects those users.

> > Instead of trying to attack CD/DVD installs, why not keep what's working
> > in  the state it's already in?
> 
> 
> Because it's a time-consuming and manual process, and resources are
> limited?

I've outlined how much time it takes. I'd happily take on that responsibility 
myself, but we need to make sure we're not kneecapping users for no real 
reason.


-- 
John M. Harris, Jr.
Splentity

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Re: Fedora 32 System-Wide Change proposal: Drop Optical Media Release Criterion

[Chris Murphy]

On Sun, Dec 15, 2019 at 7:48 PM John M. Harris Jr  wrote:
>
> While that may be representative of "where the market is going", it's not
> representative of where we are. Please keep in mind that we support far more
> than just the latest generation hardware. We don't support quite as much as
> Debian, but we have many users who don't have UEFI, or have early UEFI
> firmware, which doesn't support USB boot.

Fedora QA has variably floated dropping the physical optical boot
criterion for at least the past two or three years. In terms of
testing, it's where we have been for a while.


> This is a good example of what I mentioned about hardware that runs Fedora.
> Many people won't want to replace their hardware just because their OS is
> randomly throwing out compatibility for it, like we have been prone to do in
> Fedora recently.

Hyberbole. This is not an arbitrary proposal or process.


-- 
Chris Murphy
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Re: Fedora 32 System-Wide Change proposal: Drop Optical Media Release Criterion

[Chris Adams]

Once upon a time, John M. Harris Jr  said:
> This change is about testing those ISO images, and whether or not those ISO 
> images are release-blocking. If it's not a valid CD image (meaning it 
> wouldn't 
> boot when put into a real disk drive), it most likely wouldn't work in the 
> virtual CD images.

No, it is just about not writing those ISO images to physical media for
testing.  The ISO images will still be blocking deliverables.  Testing
of ISOs is easy and can be done automated.  Testing of physical media
requires time.

> This also doesn't solve anything for the users 
> that have first or second generation UEFI systems, or those with UEFI 
> firmware 
> provided by a vendor, that doesn't support USB boot.

So again, if UEFI boot doesn't work, don't use it?  I tried UEFI boot
with an early generation, and it had multiple issues, so I stuck with
BIOS boot for a while longer.  There's nothing in Fedora that requires
UEFI boot.

> Instead of trying to attack CD/DVD installs, why not keep what's working in 
> the state it's already in?

Because it's a time-consuming and manual process, and resources are
limited?
-- 
Chris Adams 
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Re: Fedora 32 System-Wide Change proposal: Drop Optical Media Release Criterion

[Chris Murphy]

On Sun, Dec 15, 2019 at 7:37 PM John M. Harris Jr  wrote:
>
> On Sunday, December 15, 2019 6:55:04 PM MST Chris Murphy wrote:
> > On Sun, Dec 15, 2019 at 5:48 PM John M. Harris Jr 
> > wrote:
> > >
> > >
> > > On Sunday, December 15, 2019 5:13:22 PM MST Chris Murphy wrote:
> > >
> > > > I spent about 15 minutes on this and found exactly zero systems with
> > > > DVD drives, even as an option, on the Apple and Microsoft stores. None
> > > > for System76. And none for HP. I did find DVD drives a custom build
> > > > option on Dell's website. But even if there are some ways to dig
> > > > around for systems with optical drives, it's not at all persuasive
> > > > that it's common or typical or standard on prebuilt systems.
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > > What were you looking at? I don't know about Apple, nor how that's
> > > relevant, since installing a new OS on those systems invalidates the
> > > hardware warranty,
> >
> > a. It's relevant because Fedora has explicit support for Macs in the
> > installer; and a Mac specific release criterion.
> > b. The warranty claim is incorrect.
>
> Can you provide me with the name of the Mac specific release criterion?

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_32_Final_Release_Criteria#OS_X_dual_boot

>It's
> certainly true that Apple will not service your hardware if you've got an OS
> other than their proprietary nonsense installed.

In no way is it true, let alone certainly true.

They've explicitly supported Windows (i.e. not their proprietary
nonsense) on Macs for 13 years via Boot Camp. Software they include in
default installations of macOS. I've had Fedora on Macs for many
years, including on one sent for service and they didn't care.



>
> > > and I didn't even know Microsoft sold hardware. As for System76, I
> > > recently purchased a laptop from them, their Darter Pro. It even has an
> > > option, when buying the device, to include an external optical drive,
> > > because they understand it's a feature that many people still rely on.
> >
> >
> > Yes. It is an option, not standard.
>
> For laptops. For desktops, it is still a standard offering.

Literally zero desktops I looked at today, come with optical drives
standard. Do they exist? I don't doubt they do. But they're far less
common than the standard prebuilt systems that don't have it. And it
doesn't even matter because what matters is what the community
resources dictate for this use case. And the whole impetus behind the
change proposal is lack of testers.


>
> > > It has been the standard method of installing an OS since the mid 2000s,
> > > and was popularized long before that. It is still the standard method of
> > > installing Fedora.
> >
> >
> > Your information is outdated. Apple and Microsoft haven't offered
> > optical media included in the box for years. For a long time now
> > Windows 10 OEM's offer a tool to create USB install software from a
> > recovery image on the drive. Not optical media.
>
> "included in the box" was never my claim.

A standard method of installing, and yet not included in the box. It's
a standard way to not install.

>I don't think Apple has ever
> included ANY installation media in the box.

They did for many years. Floppies, CD's, DVDs.


> > Fedora testing can't get more than a couple people to test the optical
> > release criterion. These days it's typically Adam or Kamil digging
> > into a supply of DVDs they keep around exclusively for this test,
> > having no purpose for them otherwise. Overwhelmingly QA testers and
> > feedback is based on USB stick installations.
>
> You make it sound like disks are hard to come by. They're not.

Indeed, it's the users with optical drives who are hard to come by,
especially for testing.


--
Chris Murphy
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Re: Fedora 32 System-Wide Change proposal: Drop Optical Media Release Criterion

[John M. Harris Jr]

On Sunday, December 15, 2019 8:44:29 PM MST Chris Adams wrote:
> Once upon a time, John M. Harris Jr  said:
> 
> > That would be affected by this change, as... that's a virtual CD. It'd
> > have to be a valid, working CD image.
> 
> 
> This change is about only physical optical media, not the ISO images.

This change is about testing those ISO images, and whether or not those ISO 
images are release-blocking. If it's not a valid CD image (meaning it wouldn't 
boot when put into a real disk drive), it most likely wouldn't work in the 
virtual CD images.

It definitely wouldn't work in something like a T400 running the boot firmware 
provided by Lenovo, where you've got to drop a working CD/DVD into the drive 
to boot from external media. This also doesn't solve anything for the users 
that have first or second generation UEFI systems, or those with UEFI firmware 
provided by a vendor, that doesn't support USB boot.

Instead of trying to attack CD/DVD installs, why not keep what's working in 
the state it's already in?

-- 
John M. Harris, Jr.
Splentity

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Re: Fedora 32 System-Wide Change proposal: Drop Optical Media Release Criterion

[John M. Harris Jr]

On Sunday, December 15, 2019 8:36:15 PM MST Ryan Walklin wrote:
> It's a combination of the standard TianoCore/ED2K UEFI implementation with a
> handy UI/boot menu. I'm just making the point that you can use a
> combination of a rescue CD which doesn't need to be constantly upgraded and
> a USB-based OS install if you need to reinstall with physical media.

At $WORK, I probably burn 20 CDs in a given month, sometimes several times 
that, if I'm doing updates. Making a new CD every 6 months somehow doesn't 
concern me, and as cheap as CDs are, I don't think this is something that 
hurts users.

Instead of trying to make arguments against those who use CDs, why not keep 
what already works maintained? The level of effort required here is 
surprisingly small, testing installation from a physical CD takes, with a SATA 
II connection to a hard drive, approximately 25 minutes, and only ~2 minutes 
of that require user interaction. Actually less, if using default options. 
From there, the only requirement is clicking "Reboot" and waiting for the 
installed system to boot. At most, in addition, it'd require logging in with 
the user you've set up. That's less than an hour total, and it only needs to 
be done after automated tests with virtual CDs pass.

-- 
John M. Harris, Jr.
Splentity

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Re: Fedora 32 System-Wide Change proposal: Drop Optical Media Release Criterion

[Chris Adams]

Once upon a time, John M. Harris Jr  said:
> That would be affected by this change, as... that's a virtual CD. It'd have 
> to 
> be a valid, working CD image.

This change is about only physical optical media, not the ISO images.
-- 
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Re: Fedora 32 System-Wide Change proposal: Drop Optical Media Release Criterion

[John M. Harris Jr]

On Sunday, December 15, 2019 8:12:55 PM MST Chris Adams wrote:
> Once upon a time, John M. Harris Jr  said:
> 
> > I can provide an example or two, but I'd rather not waste time compiling a
> >  list. A good example, any server using iDRAC6,7,8 or 9, such as a
> > PowerEdge R440. These are in the interesting edge case that I mentioned,
> > where it supports USB boot if you physically connect a USB drive, but you
> > can't use USB images over the iDRAC.
> 
> 
> Virtual media is not relevant to this change (ISOs will still be
> tested), but I'm not sure what you even mean by "USB images over the
> iDRAC".  I re-installed some old R610s (DRAC6) Friday by booting from a
> virtual CD connected to an ISO image file, and they worked just fine.

That would be affected by this change, as... that's a virtual CD. It'd have to 
be a valid, working CD image.

-- 
John M. Harris, Jr.
Splentity

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Re: Fedora 32 System-Wide Change proposal: Drop Optical Media Release Criterion

[Ryan Walklin]

> I can provide an example or two, but I'd rather not waste time compiling a 
> list. A good example, any server using iDRAC6,7,8 or 9, such as a PowerEdge 
> R440. These are in the interesting edge case that I mentioned, where it 
> supports USB boot if you physically connect a USB drive, but you can't use 
> USB 
> images over the iDRAC. An example of a system that cannot boot from USB at 
> all 
> is a ThinkPad T400, running default boot firmware, which is what most users 
> that own that laptop would have.

I don't have experience with either system, but as Chris points out, virtual CD 
ISOs seem to work. A quick google suggests the ThinkPad T400 can both boot and 
upgrade its firmware/BIOS via USB.

> 
> > Can you not use a generic rescue DVD/CD running
> > something like rEFInd http://www.rodsbooks.com/refind to then actually boot
> > from USB? Then you wouldn't have to faff keeping your optical media up to
> > date anyway.
> 
> I have no idea whether or not that'd work, but I generally don't mess around 
> with random tools like that to try to get something to boot. 

It's a combination of the standard TianoCore/ED2K UEFI implementation with a 
handy UI/boot menu. I'm just making the point that you can use a combination of 
a rescue CD which doesn't need to be constantly upgraded and a USB-based OS 
install if you need to reinstall with physical media.  
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Re: Fedora 32 System-Wide Change proposal: Drop Optical Media Release Criterion

[Chris Adams]

Once upon a time, John M. Harris Jr  said:
> I can provide an example or two, but I'd rather not waste time compiling a 
> list. A good example, any server using iDRAC6,7,8 or 9, such as a PowerEdge 
> R440. These are in the interesting edge case that I mentioned, where it 
> supports USB boot if you physically connect a USB drive, but you can't use 
> USB 
> images over the iDRAC.

Virtual media is not relevant to this change (ISOs will still be
tested), but I'm not sure what you even mean by "USB images over the
iDRAC".  I re-installed some old R610s (DRAC6) Friday by booting from a
virtual CD connected to an ISO image file, and they worked just fine.

-- 
Chris Adams 
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Re: Fedora 32 System-Wide Change proposal: Drop Optical Media Release Criterion

[John M. Harris Jr]

On Sunday, December 15, 2019 7:54:05 PM MST Ryan Walklin wrote:
> On Mon, 16 Dec 2019, at 1:39 PM, John M. Harris Jr wrote:
> 
> 
> > Please see the examples cited earlier in the thread, of systems that
> > cannot be installed from USB.
> 
> 
> Those are pretty vague references to old workstations and servers rather
> than specific make/model.

I can provide an example or two, but I'd rather not waste time compiling a 
list. A good example, any server using iDRAC6,7,8 or 9, such as a PowerEdge 
R440. These are in the interesting edge case that I mentioned, where it 
supports USB boot if you physically connect a USB drive, but you can't use USB 
images over the iDRAC. An example of a system that cannot boot from USB at all 
is a ThinkPad T400, running default boot firmware, which is what most users 
that own that laptop would have.

> Can you not use a generic rescue DVD/CD running
> something like rEFInd http://www.rodsbooks.com/refind to then actually boot
> from USB? Then you wouldn't have to faff keeping your optical media up to
> date anyway.

I have no idea whether or not that'd work, but I generally don't mess around 
with random tools like that to try to get something to boot. Looks like it 
requires UEFI, so I'm going to go with "Not in most cases", though it might 
work for the systems with UEFI implementations that don't support USB boot. 
When I'm wearing my user hat, I just want it to work! It currently does, and 
it doesn't actually take a lot of maintenance to keep it working. I'd be happy 
to jump on the list of people doing QA of physical DVDs, so long as we can 
keep it as release-blocking, because this WILL hurt users if it is dropped, 
and we WILL have a release with broken optical media installation, most likely 
in the first release to adopt this Change.

-- 
John M. Harris, Jr.
Splentity

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Re: Fedora 32 System-Wide Change proposal: Drop Optical Media Release Criterion

[Ryan Walklin]

On Mon, 16 Dec 2019, at 1:39 PM, John M. Harris Jr wrote:

> Please see the examples cited earlier in the thread, of systems that cannot 
> be 
> installed from USB.

Those are pretty vague references to old workstations and servers rather than 
specific make/model. Can you not use a generic rescue DVD/CD running something 
like rEFInd http://www.rodsbooks.com/refind to then actually boot from USB? 
Then you wouldn't have to faff keeping your optical media up to date anyway.

https://www.kubuntuforums.net/showthread.php/43221-GRUB-2-A-Guide-for-Users/page14?p=376838&viewfull=1#post376838

On Mon, 16 Dec 2019, at 1:45 PM, Kevin Kofler wrote:

> The netinstall:
> * is not usable offline,
> * in particular, is a pain to set up if all you have is a WPA-protected
>   WLAN,
> * or in particular, will not work at all if your WiFi chipset requires a
>   non-upstream (either proprietary, or not submitted upstream yet, or stuck
>   in staging) driver,

As a tangent. this is pretty annoying, even when installing from USB I have to 
manually go out and grab firmware and NetworkManager packages for my laptop. 
Even worse they seem to be installed on the live images themselves and so WiFi 
works in Anaconda but not in the installed system.
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Re: Fedora 32 System-Wide Change proposal: Drop Optical Media Release Criterion

[Chris Adams]

Once upon a time, John M. Harris Jr  said:
> We don't support quite as much as 
> Debian, but we have many users who don't have UEFI, or have early UEFI 
> firmware, which doesn't support USB boot.

There's no requirement for UEFI boot - if for some reason a system
doesn't support USB under UEFI, it is perfectly fine to install in BIOS
mode.

-- 
Chris Adams 
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Re: Fedora 32 System-Wide Change proposal: Drop Optical Media Release Criterion

[Chris Adams]

Once upon a time, John M. Harris Jr  said:
> In fact, I just checked, and they're a standard offering 
> on ALL of the current line Dell workstations which are RHEL certified.

Also, this is not true.  I found the Dell Linux workstation page, and no
models on that page include an optical drive in the standard
configurations.
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Re: Fedora 32 System-Wide Change proposal: Drop Optical Media Release Criterion

[John M. Harris Jr]

On Sunday, December 15, 2019 7:38:43 PM MST Chris Adams wrote:
> Once upon a time, John M. Harris Jr  said:
> 
> > As explained earlier in this thread, DVD drives are still a standard
> > offering  on prebuilt systems. In fact, I just checked, and they're a
> > standard offering on ALL of the current line Dell workstations which are
> > RHEL certified.
> 
> The number of Dell workstations sold from a "RHEL certified" list is
> miniscule compared to the number of PC-class computers sold.  It's
> possible that some "RHEL certified" requirement includes an optical
> drive (I have no idea, since I didn't even know there was a "RHEL
> certified" Dell, and I buy a lot of Dells).  Also, what one vendor does
> for one particular class of workstation is far from representative of
> all prebuilt systems.

To clarify, I already had that info rattling around, so I decided to throw it 
out to specify. I think "RHEL certified" just means they sent a system of that 
model to Red Hat, and one of Red Hat's engineers checked to see if everything 
has a working kernel module to support it, or paid Red Hat to throw their name 
behind it one way or another. Regardless, it's the Dell systems that are 
"designed to run GNU/Linux".

That those systems are a relatively small number is precisely why I later 
checked Walmart and Best Buy's offerings, you can read my findings on that 
earlier in the thread, but whether or not it had an optical drive seemed to 
depend heavily on the range it was in (low range systems especially seemed to 
have them).

> I just checked my local Best Buy's website - of the desktop computer
> models available in the store, only about 1/3 of them have an optical
> drive.  Only two out of sixty notebooks have an optical drive.  I think
> that's a lot more representative of where the market is going.

While that may be representative of "where the market is going", it's not 
representative of where we are. Please keep in mind that we support far more 
than just the latest generation hardware. We don't support quite as much as 
Debian, but we have many users who don't have UEFI, or have early UEFI 
firmware, which doesn't support USB boot.

> My home computer still has an optical drive, only because the drive
> still works 10 years after I bought it (or at least it did last time I
> used it, which IIRC was maybe early this year).  If I try to use the
> drive and it doesn't work, I won't replace it.  However, last time I
> tried to burn something (a couple of years ago?), all the blank media on
> my shelf was no longer any good, so I just gave someone an old thumb
> drive (cheaper than buying more media).

This is a good example of what I mentioned about hardware that runs Fedora. 
Many people won't want to replace their hardware just because their OS is 
randomly throwing out compatibility for it, like we have been prone to do in 
Fedora recently. I still use an X200 Tablet as my daily driver, which is a 
Core 2 Duo system from 2008.

I also have a ThinkPad T400, which, using the default boot firmware, cannot 
boot from USB. (Though I use blobless Coreboot, where that's not an issue).

-- 
John M. Harris, Jr.
Splentity

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Re: Fedora 32 System-Wide Change proposal: Drop Optical Media Release Criterion

[Kevin Kofler]

Chris Murphy wrote:
> But therein lies the advantage of a simpler optical only image, less
> likelihood for such regressions. And any netinstall can be pointed to
> any release repo, so it's not like you must have a release version of
> the image - in the worst case scenario you still wouldn't be
> abandoned. Further, the netinstall has the installer rescue boot
> option.

The netinstall:
* is not usable offline,
* in particular, is a pain to set up if all you have is a WPA-protected
  WLAN,
* or in particular, will not work at all if your WiFi chipset requires a
  non-upstream (either proprietary, or not submitted upstream yet, or stuck
  in staging) driver,
* does not provide a live environment, so you cannot try it out before the
  installation is complete,
* has only a minimal rescue environment that is actually often not as nice
  to use for rescue purposes as a graphical live environment,
* does not install the exact set of packages the live image ships, and there
  are technical limitations that do not allow as much fine-tuning as in the
  live kickstart (e.g., there is no way for us to tell the netinstall that
  KDE users will not need some tools from the System Administration group
  that have KDE equivalents, whereas the live kickstart can explicitly
  blacklist unneeded packages).

Kevin Kofler
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Re: Fedora 32 System-Wide Change proposal: Drop Optical Media Release Criterion

[John M. Harris Jr]

On Sunday, December 15, 2019 7:37:06 PM MST Ryan Walklin wrote: 
> Presumably they all also have USB ports though? I'd be more concerned about
> this if there were significant amounts of hardware without USB drives that
> had optical drives. I'd wager the reverse (Ultrabooks, any new laptop, NUCs
> etc) is the overwhelming majority.
> 
> Not blocking for optical media install support seems fairly pragmatic to
> me.

Please see the examples cited earlier in the thread, of systems that cannot be 
installed from USB.

-- 
John M. Harris, Jr.
Splentity

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Re: Fedora 32 System-Wide Change proposal: Drop Optical Media Release Criterion

[Chris Adams]

Once upon a time, John M. Harris Jr  said:
> As explained earlier in this thread, DVD drives are still a standard offering 
> on prebuilt systems. In fact, I just checked, and they're a standard offering 
> on ALL of the current line Dell workstations which are RHEL certified.

The number of Dell workstations sold from a "RHEL certified" list is
miniscule compared to the number of PC-class computers sold.  It's
possible that some "RHEL certified" requirement includes an optical
drive (I have no idea, since I didn't even know there was a "RHEL
certified" Dell, and I buy a lot of Dells).  Also, what one vendor does
for one particular class of workstation is far from representative of
all prebuilt systems.

I just checked my local Best Buy's website - of the desktop computer
models available in the store, only about 1/3 of them have an optical
drive.  Only two out of sixty notebooks have an optical drive.  I think
that's a lot more representative of where the market is going.

My home computer still has an optical drive, only because the drive
still works 10 years after I bought it (or at least it did last time I
used it, which IIRC was maybe early this year).  If I try to use the
drive and it doesn't work, I won't replace it.  However, last time I
tried to burn something (a couple of years ago?), all the blank media on
my shelf was no longer any good, so I just gave someone an old thumb
drive (cheaper than buying more media).

-- 
Chris Adams 
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Re: Fedora 32 System-Wide Change proposal: Drop Optical Media Release Criterion

[John M. Harris Jr]

On Sunday, December 15, 2019 6:55:04 PM MST Chris Murphy wrote:
> On Sun, Dec 15, 2019 at 5:48 PM John M. Harris Jr 
> wrote:
> >
> >
> > On Sunday, December 15, 2019 5:13:22 PM MST Chris Murphy wrote:
> > 
> > > I spent about 15 minutes on this and found exactly zero systems with
> > > DVD drives, even as an option, on the Apple and Microsoft stores. None
> > > for System76. And none for HP. I did find DVD drives a custom build
> > > option on Dell's website. But even if there are some ways to dig
> > > around for systems with optical drives, it's not at all persuasive
> > > that it's common or typical or standard on prebuilt systems.
> >
> >
> >
> > What were you looking at? I don't know about Apple, nor how that's
> > relevant, since installing a new OS on those systems invalidates the
> > hardware warranty,
> 
> a. It's relevant because Fedora has explicit support for Macs in the
> installer; and a Mac specific release criterion.
> b. The warranty claim is incorrect.

Can you provide me with the name of the Mac specific release criterion? It's 
certainly true that Apple will not service your hardware if you've got an OS 
other than their proprietary nonsense installed.

> > and I didn't even know Microsoft sold hardware. As for System76, I
> > recently purchased a laptop from them, their Darter Pro. It even has an
> > option, when buying the device, to include an external optical drive,
> > because they understand it's a feature that many people still rely on.
> 
> 
> Yes. It is an option, not standard.

For laptops. For desktops, it is still a standard offering.


> > It has been the standard method of installing an OS since the mid 2000s,
> > and was popularized long before that. It is still the standard method of
> > installing Fedora.
> 
> 
> Your information is outdated. Apple and Microsoft haven't offered
> optical media included in the box for years. For a long time now
> Windows 10 OEM's offer a tool to create USB install software from a
> recovery image on the drive. Not optical media.

"included in the box" was never my claim. I don't think Apple has ever 
included ANY installation media in the box. As for Microsoft, they stopped 
including any installation media at all for OEM-installed systems, though the 
OEM might throw in an install DVD.

Another interesting anecdote: I recently build a new Windows test machine, and 
the motherboard (current generation) came with a driver CD.

> Fedora testing can't get more than a couple people to test the optical
> release criterion. These days it's typically Adam or Kamil digging
> into a supply of DVDs they keep around exclusively for this test,
> having no purpose for them otherwise. Overwhelmingly QA testers and
> feedback is based on USB stick installations.

You make it sound like disks are hard to come by. They're not.

-- 
John M. Harris, Jr.
Splentity

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Re: Fedora 32 System-Wide Change proposal: Drop Optical Media Release Criterion

[Ryan Walklin]

On Mon, 16 Dec 2019, at 1:29 PM, Kevin Kofler wrote:
> Chris Murphy wrote:
> > Three years ago I did a more involved search when looking for a new
> > laptop. Zero optical drives in new hardware. Only as external
> > accessory add-ons.
> 
> Then you did not search well. The ThinkPad L440 my mother bought in 
> 2016 has
> an optical drive. And even now, there are still plenty of notebooks with
> an optical drive:
> https://geizhals.at/?cat=nb&xf=84_Blu-ray+(BD-R%2FRE)~84_Blu-ray+(BD-ROM)~84_DVD%2B%2F-RW~84_DVD-ROM

Presumably they all also have USB ports though? I'd be more concerned about 
this if there were significant amounts of hardware without USB drives that had 
optical drives. I'd wager the reverse (Ultrabooks, any new laptop, NUCs etc) is 
the overwhelming majority.

Not blocking for optical media install support seems fairly pragmatic to me.

Ryan
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Re: Fedora 32 System-Wide Change proposal: Drop Optical Media Release Criterion

[Kevin Kofler]

Chris Murphy wrote:
> Three years ago I did a more involved search when looking for a new
> laptop. Zero optical drives in new hardware. Only as external
> accessory add-ons.

Then you did not search well. The ThinkPad L440 my mother bought in 2016 has
an optical drive. And even now, there are still plenty of notebooks with
an optical drive:
https://geizhals.at/?cat=nb&xf=84_Blu-ray+(BD-R%2FRE)~84_Blu-ray+(BD-ROM)~84_DVD%2B%2F-RW~84_DVD-ROM

Kevin Kofler
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Re: Fedora 32 System-Wide Change proposal: Drop Optical Media Release Criterion

[Chris Murphy]

On Sun, Dec 15, 2019 at 2:32 PM Kevin Kofler  wrote:
>
> Frantisek Zatloukal wrote:
> > Just note that I mean blocking by "supported". I am not talking about
> > dropping capability of installation from optical media.
>
> But if:
> * QA does not test it, and
> * even if somebody tests it and finds it broken, the release will not get
>   delayed for it,
> this can effectively break at any time, for an entire release, just because
> you happen to release in the wrong moment and are not willing to wait.

Possible, but not probable, based on the historical record. And even
if not a blocker, tested fixes would surely be granted a freeze
exception.

But therein lies the advantage of a simpler optical only image, less
likelihood for such regressions. And any netinstall can be pointed to
any release repo, so it's not like you must have a release version of
the image - in the worst case scenario you still wouldn't be
abandoned. Further, the netinstall has the installer rescue boot
option.


-- 
Chris Murphy
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Re: Fedora 32 System-Wide Change proposal: Drop Optical Media Release Criterion

[Chris Murphy]

On Sun, Dec 15, 2019 at 5:48 PM John M. Harris Jr  wrote:
>
> On Sunday, December 15, 2019 5:13:22 PM MST Chris Murphy wrote:
> > I spent about 15 minutes on this and found exactly zero systems with
> > DVD drives, even as an option, on the Apple and Microsoft stores. None
> > for System76. And none for HP. I did find DVD drives a custom build
> > option on Dell's website. But even if there are some ways to dig
> > around for systems with optical drives, it's not at all persuasive
> > that it's common or typical or standard on prebuilt systems.
>
> What were you looking at? I don't know about Apple, nor how that's relevant,
> since installing a new OS on those systems invalidates the hardware warranty,

a. It's relevant because Fedora has explicit support for Macs in the
installer; and a Mac specific release criterion.
b. The warranty claim is incorrect.

> and I didn't even know Microsoft sold hardware. As for System76, I recently
> purchased a laptop from them, their Darter Pro. It even has an option, when
> buying the device, to include an external optical drive, because they
> understand it's a feature that many people still rely on.

Yes. It is an option, not standard.


> > Dell Precision 5280 $1629, six hard drive bays, optical drive not
> > included, but is available as an option. Windows optical media is not
> > included. But there is a single option to get it, on USB. It's not an
> > option to get it on a DVD.
> >
> > But you're saying it's standard way to install any system. Gotcha.
>
> It has been the standard method of installing an OS since the mid 2000s, and
> was popularized long before that. It is still the standard method of
> installing Fedora.

Your information is outdated. Apple and Microsoft haven't offered
optical media included in the box for years. For a long time now
Windows 10 OEM's offer a tool to create USB install software from a
recovery image on the drive. Not optical media.

Fedora testing can't get more than a couple people to test the optical
release criterion. These days it's typically Adam or Kamil digging
into a supply of DVDs they keep around exclusively for this test,
having no purpose for them otherwise. Overwhelmingly QA testers and
feedback is based on USB stick installations.


-- 
Chris Murphy
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Re: Fedora 32 System-Wide Change proposal: Drop Optical Media Release Criterion

[John M. Harris Jr]

On Sunday, December 15, 2019 5:13:22 PM MST Chris Murphy wrote:
> I spent about 15 minutes on this and found exactly zero systems with
> DVD drives, even as an option, on the Apple and Microsoft stores. None
> for System76. And none for HP. I did find DVD drives a custom build
> option on Dell's website. But even if there are some ways to dig
> around for systems with optical drives, it's not at all persuasive
> that it's common or typical or standard on prebuilt systems.

What were you looking at? I don't know about Apple, nor how that's relevant, 
since installing a new OS on those systems invalidates the hardware warranty, 
and I didn't even know Microsoft sold hardware. As for System76, I recently 
purchased a laptop from them, their Darter Pro. It even has an option, when 
buying the device, to include an external optical drive, because they 
understand it's a feature that many people still rely on.

I just checked for the consumer side, both Walmart and Best Buy's offerings. 
My findings are expanded in the section below.

> Three years ago I did a more involved search when looking for a new
> laptop. Zero optical drives in new hardware. Only as external
> accessory add-ons. Of course my search was biased in favor of weight.
> Whereas your search is biased for workstations. Based on user forums
> and bug reports, laptops are a significant portion of the user base,
> so to discount them entirely isn't convincing.

While some newer laptops will still have the optical drive integrated, in the 
interest of going to "slim" designs, many manufacturers have started offering 
external drives with their systems as a way of losing some of that, or moving 
to weird slit-style drives, where you push the drive into the system, instead 
of actually opening a drive door. The laptops that still have them integrated 
are the business class lines, as well as the low end consumer offerings.

What's weird, to me, is that the mid to high-end consumer devices don't have 
them, but the lower-end ones still do. Could be new old stock.

> A simple google search on the death of optical drives turns up 51
> million results, the first page includes:
> 
> Death of the Computer Optical Drive
> Why most modern PCs don't feature CD, DVD, or Blu-ray drives  - 2019,
> Lifewire
>
> Why you might still want an optical drive - 2015, PC Magazine
> 
> The End of Optical Storage? It’s Here - 2012, Network World

I've seen these articles as well, but it's just not in line with where we 
actually are.

> Our broad heterogeneous user based probably does have more dependency
> on optical drives than recent hardware trends indicate. But I don't
> buy the idea at all that optical drives are still in their heyday.

They're not really in their heyday anymore, but they are still incredibly 
common.

> > > Practically speaking, I'd say that adding the same warning as is in
> > > UNetbootin section in Fedora Docs [0] to the Live CD section [1] would
> > > make sense, but this is just an idea and probably out of scope of this
> > > thread.>
> >
> >
> > I have no idea why you'd do that, nor why anyone would want to do it.
> > That'd be like telling folks installing from DVD images isn't the right
> > thing to do, which makes no sense, as it's the standard way to install
> > any system, and has been since the mid 2000s.
> 
> 
> Optical drives are the exception, rather than the rule. Clicking
> around on Dell's sight for desktops, I tried to click the middle
> option each time, neither high nor low end. I get
> 
> Dell Precision 5280 $1629, six hard drive bays, optical drive not
> included, but is available as an option. Windows optical media is not
> included. But there is a single option to get it, on USB. It's not an
> option to get it on a DVD.
> 
> But you're saying it's standard way to install any system. Gotcha.

It has been the standard method of installing an OS since the mid 2000s, and 
was popularized long before that. It is still the standard method of 
installing Fedora.

-- 
John M. Harris, Jr.
Splentity

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Re: Fedora 32 System-Wide Change proposal: Drop Optical Media Release Criterion

[Chris Murphy]

On Sun, Dec 15, 2019 at 4:39 PM John M. Harris Jr  wrote:
>
> On Sunday, December 15, 2019 1:53:15 PM MST Frantisek Zatloukal wrote:
> > On Sun, Dec 15, 2019 at 9:05 PM John M. Harris Jr 
> >
> > wrote:
> > > That was not brought up elsewhere in this thread. Who is considering this,
> > > and
> > > why? That would mean that a large portion of users would *not be able to
> > > install Fedora*.
> >
> > Just note that I mean blocking by "supported". I am not talking about
> > dropping capability of installation from optical media. Might have been
> > slight misunderstanding and bad wording on my side. Also, I doubt that your
> > "large portion" is correct.
>
> As explained earlier in this thread, DVD drives are still a standard offering
> on prebuilt systems. In fact, I just checked, and they're a standard offering
> on ALL of the current line Dell workstations which are RHEL certified.

I spent about 15 minutes on this and found exactly zero systems with
DVD drives, even as an option, on the Apple and Microsoft stores. None
for System76. And none for HP. I did find DVD drives a custom build
option on Dell's website. But even if there are some ways to dig
around for systems with optical drives, it's not at all persuasive
that it's common or typical or standard on prebuilt systems.

Three years ago I did a more involved search when looking for a new
laptop. Zero optical drives in new hardware. Only as external
accessory add-ons. Of course my search was biased in favor of weight.
Whereas your search is biased for workstations. Based on user forums
and bug reports, laptops are a significant portion of the user base,
so to discount them entirely isn't convincing.

A simple google search on the death of optical drives turns up 51
million results, the first page includes:

Death of the Computer Optical Drive
Why most modern PCs don't feature CD, DVD, or Blu-ray drives  - 2019, Lifewire

Why you might still want an optical drive - 2015, PC Magazine

The End of Optical Storage? It’s Here - 2012, Network World

Our broad heterogeneous user based probably does have more dependency
on optical drives than recent hardware trends indicate. But I don't
buy the idea at all that optical drives are still in their heyday.



> > Practically speaking, I'd say that adding the same warning as is in
> > UNetbootin section in Fedora Docs [0] to the Live CD section [1] would make
> > sense, but this is just an idea and probably out of scope of this thread.
>
> I have no idea why you'd do that, nor why anyone would want to do it. That'd
> be like telling folks installing from DVD images isn't the right thing to do,
> which makes no sense, as it's the standard way to install any system, and has
> been since the mid 2000s.

Optical drives are the exception, rather than the rule. Clicking
around on Dell's sight for desktops, I tried to click the middle
option each time, neither high nor low end. I get

Dell Precision 5280 $1629, six hard drive bays, optical drive not
included, but is available as an option. Windows optical media is not
included. But there is a single option to get it, on USB. It's not an
option to get it on a DVD.

But you're saying it's standard way to install any system. Gotcha.


-- 
Chris Murphy
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Re: Fedora 32 System-Wide Change proposal: Drop Optical Media Release Criterion

[John M. Harris Jr]

On Sunday, December 15, 2019 1:53:15 PM MST Frantisek Zatloukal wrote:
> On Sun, Dec 15, 2019 at 9:05 PM John M. Harris Jr 
> 
> wrote:
> > That was not brought up elsewhere in this thread. Who is considering this,
> > and
> > why? That would mean that a large portion of users would *not be able to
> > install Fedora*.
> 
> Just note that I mean blocking by "supported". I am not talking about
> dropping capability of installation from optical media. Might have been
> slight misunderstanding and bad wording on my side. Also, I doubt that your
> "large portion" is correct.

As explained earlier in this thread, DVD drives are still a standard offering 
on prebuilt systems. In fact, I just checked, and they're a standard offering 
on ALL of the current line Dell workstations which are RHEL certified.

> > UNetbootin has never been a supported method of creating USB media.
> > Optical media is a supported installation method.
> 
> It doesn't matter what was or wasn't supported. WIth definition of what I
> mean with "supported" above, if this proposal is accepted, UNetbootin
> wouldn't be supported too differently than physical optical media. Users
> would be able to report bugs with these methods and those bugs wouldn't be
> release blocking.
> 
> Practically speaking, I'd say that adding the same warning as is in
> UNetbootin section in Fedora Docs [0] to the Live CD section [1] would make
> sense, but this is just an idea and probably out of scope of this thread.

I have no idea why you'd do that, nor why anyone would want to do it. That'd 
be like telling folks installing from DVD images isn't the right thing to do, 
which makes no sense, as it's the standard way to install any system, and has 
been since the mid 2000s.

-- 
John M. Harris, Jr.
Splentity

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Re: Fedora 32 System-Wide Change proposal: Drop Optical Media Release Criterion

[Kevin Kofler]

Frantisek Zatloukal wrote:
> Just note that I mean blocking by "supported". I am not talking about
> dropping capability of installation from optical media.

But if:
* QA does not test it, and
* even if somebody tests it and finds it broken, the release will not get
  delayed for it,
this can effectively break at any time, for an entire release, just because 
you happen to release in the wrong moment and are not willing to wait.

Kevin Kofler
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Re: Fedora 32 System-Wide Change proposal: Drop Optical Media Release Criterion

[Frantisek Zatloukal]

On Sun, Dec 15, 2019 at 9:05 PM John M. Harris Jr 
wrote:

> That was not brought up elsewhere in this thread. Who is considering this,
> and
> why? That would mean that a large portion of users would *not be able to
> install Fedora*.
>

Just note that I mean blocking by "supported". I am not talking about
dropping capability of installation from optical media. Might have been
slight misunderstanding and bad wording on my side. Also, I doubt that your
"large portion" is correct.


> UNetbootin has never been a supported method of creating USB media.
> Optical media is a supported installation method.
>

It doesn't matter what was or wasn't supported. WIth definition of what I
mean with "supported" above, if this proposal is accepted, UNetbootin
wouldn't be supported too differently than physical optical media. Users
would be able to report bugs with these methods and those bugs wouldn't be
release blocking.

Practically speaking, I'd say that adding the same warning as is in
UNetbootin section in Fedora Docs [0] to the Live CD section [1] would make
sense, but this is just an idea and probably out of scope of this thread.

[0]
https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/quick-docs/creating-and-using-a-live-installation-image/index.html#unetbootin
[1]
https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/quick-docs/creating-and-using-a-live-installation-image/index.html#proc_creating-and-using-live-cd
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