Re: [atomic-devel] Fedora 23 Cloud Atomic Developer Mode Preview

[Jonathan Lebon <jlebon redhat com>]

----- Original Message -----
> I tend to think of this kind of problem in terms of:
> 
> 1) Who bears the cognitive load and when?
> 2) Who bears the development load and when?

Thanks for that perspective. It was an interesting read.

> With a separate image:
> 
> * developers have a development and cognitive load at image design
> time (designing the Developer Mode)
> * release engineering have a development load at image design time
> (updating the toolchain to produce a separate image for interactive
> use, specifying the additional images)
> * end users have a cognitive load at image download time (choosing
> which image to download)
> * cognitive load can be minimised at image boot time, since dev
> environments can be configured to use a developer mode image, while
> CI, QA, staging, and production environments don't

There is also the cost of QA now having to sanity-check and test the
contents of two image versions (not to mention each version is offered
in multiple formats).

I think before we invest in the upfront cost of splitting it into
two images and figuring out all the releng and QA issues, it's worth
it to put the unified version in front of the public and get more
feedback.

My feeling is that with proper docs and presentation, a 2s timeout
shouldn't be an issue (though I know that was not the only reason for
which you suggested splitting them). In the worse case, they realize
that they missed the option and hard reset the VM.

As Colin mentioned, this is sorta starting to overlap with ADB in the
sense that they solve the same problem (easily boot locally w/o
cloud-init) but for two different use cases (playing around vs.
developing). It might make sense later to take it out of the Atomic
image and instead make it part of ADB (assuming it is properly
presented).

Cheers,

Jonathan