u+1 team mailing list archive

[Eric Appleman <erappleman@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 08/28/2012 12:04 AM, Nicholas Skaggs wrote:
> FYI -- as spoken of earlier, here's the details on dropping the
> alternate installer in 12.10. Again, this is just for ubuntu, and not
> a decision for any flavors. As far as I know, no flavors have
> committed to dropping the alternate cd's. This transition will occur
> with the next milestone, which is Beta 1. As part of this, we'll need
> to migrate the alternate testcases and add new testcases in support of
> the new features in ubiquity. Thanks!
>
> Nicholas
>
> -------- Original Message --------
> Subject: 	Proposal to drop Ubuntu alternate CDs for 12.10
> Date: 	Mon, 27 Aug 2012 14:50:24 -0700
> From: 	Steve Langasek <steve.langasek@xxxxxxxxxx>
> To: 	ubuntu-devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>
>
>
> Dear developers,
>
> As part of ongoing efforts to reduce the number of images we ship for
> Ubuntu, and to make the desktop image more useful in a variety of scenarios,
> Dmitrijs Ledkovs has been hard at work in quantal adding support for LVM,
> cryptsetup, and RAID to ubiquity.
>
> The good news is that this means today we already have support in ubiquity
> for cryptsetup and LVM in the guided partitioner, with manual partitioning
> support soon to follow.  The somewhat bad news is that we will not have
> support for RAID setup in ubiquity this cycle.
>
> I would like to propose that, in spite of not reaching 100% feature parity,
> we drop the Ubuntu alternate installer for 12.10 anyway.
>
> The arguments that I see in favor of this are:
>
>  - RAID is relatively straightforward to turn on post-install.  You install
>    to one disk, boot to the system, assemble a degraded RAID with the other
>    disks, copy your data, reboot to the degraded RAID, and finally merge
>    your install disk into the array.  It's not quick, but it's *possible*.
>  - Desktop installs on RAID will still be supported by other paths: using
>    either netboot or server CDs and installing the desktop task.
>  - RAID on the desktop really is a minority use case.  Laptops almost never
>    have room for more than one hard drive; desktops can but are rarely
>    equipped with them.  So the set of affected users is very small.  Some
>    rough analysis of bug data in launchpad suggests a very liberal upper
>    bound of .8% of desktop users.
>  - RAID on the desktop correlates with conservatism in other areas:  we can
>    probably continue to recommend 12.04 instead of 12.10 for the affected
>    users.
>  - It lets us tighten our focus on making the desktop CD shine: fewer images
>    to QA, fewer different paths to get right (like the CD apt upgrader case)
>    means more time to focus on the things that matter.
>
> So my opinion is that we should drop the Ubuntu alternate CDs with Beta 1. 
> Other flavors are free to continue building alternate CDs (i.e.,
> "debian-installer" CDs) according to their preference, but we would drop
> them for Ubuntu and direct users to one of the above-mentioned alternatives
> if they care about RAID on desktop installs.
>
> Please note one implication here that, with the possibility of not having
> i386 server CDs for 12.10, the only install option for an i386 user wanting
> RAID on a desktop would be to install via netboot or with the mini ISO.
>
> Do any of you see reasons for not making this change, and dropping the
> alternate CDs?  Are there shortcomings to the proposed fallback solutions
> that we haven't identified here?
>
> Thanks,
> -- 
> Steve Langasek                   Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS
> Debian Developer                   to set it on, and I can move the world.
> Ubuntu Developer                                    http://www.debian.org/
> slangasek@xxxxxxxxxx                                     vorlon@xxxxxxxxxx
>
>
>
>
>
>
I don't use the alternate installer very often, but its reliability and
stability should not be underappreciated.

I'd like to see it stay, especially for those days when Ubiquity is broken.

- Eric