Re: [atomic-devel] please help us test atomic workstation/host images for f27

[Colin Walters <walters verbum org>]

On Sat, Nov 11, 2017, at 07:00 PM, William Brown wrote:
>
> 1) opensc should be part of the base image as it enables freeipa
> smartcard authentication and other related parts to work correctly (I'm
> layering it in for now 

Me too, in my case for yubikey.   That said my opinion here is that we simply cannot
meet the conflicting goals of "small base" and "full functionality" without
involving some package layering particularly for individual machines.  I think
the package layering is what makes the system fully practical today.   I also
have `vagrant-libvirt` and `origin-clients` layered, as well as a few random
things like `xsel`, `powerline`, and `git-evtag`.

(On my home Atomic Host server I also have`libvirt` layered, which is
 a big topic in itself)

That said I think it's really interesting to have this debate; the transition
from "no layering" to "some layering" is a large one (suddenly e.g. you
need to download the 40MB repodata just to check if you have an update).
And rpm-ostree is very "loud" in the `status` command about exactly
what you have layered - in large contrast to every other "package classification"
in Fedora like comps, which tends to just dissolve into the "bag of packages"
model.

I think we'll need to take some of this to the Workstation list - there's
a lot of bigger picture questions around how much the default set resembles
the default workstation.  For example, IMO we shouldn't include many apps
at all by default, since it's confusing to have both a flatpak version and a built-in.
But there are deep issues there - if we go to the point of not having a browser
by default for example, that'll create bootstrapping issues for some people.

Personally though I think the most important thing is to make the "tools/dev"
container flow more friendly.  That's something people can do without
going all the way to Atomic Workstation.