Planning for installation

Ikey

Short and sweet, opening for discussion and engagement.

The project currently has 2 tightly related primary goals:

Widen project bandwidth

More folks want and need to be able to contribute to the project. To facilitate this the prototype infrastructure is being accelerated to allow onboarding of gatekeepers and automatic builds of contributed packages.

Get installable.

Blockers:

Suitable installer (Calamares is GUI only and tightly locked to KDE... Extremely heavy given we want headless and GNOME configurations
Need a moss-triggers implementation (stateless respecting, akin to usysconf but with defered + ordering
Need a moss-boot implementation: Akin to clr-boot-manager but with transaction knowledge and no kludges to support legacy style system roots, leverage all the systemd-boot (v250+) features
Update support. Kinda important.

We need to define MVP installable ISO, and initially support headless installs. Typical stack including:

NetworkManager
GNOME ..

etc.

Gavin

Ikey
Would it be possible to use and improve upon the installer used by Solus? I didn't realize Calamares was tightly locked to KDE.

Truth be told, I wish I could code, but tried learning Python several times but coding was just not making any sense to me. Really wanted to learn because I wanted to build both a music player and email client with simple and clean interfaces. But alas!

ermo

I really, really, really don't like the make publish workflow (publish, wait for build to complete, publish again manually).

It's literally and figuratively the one "feature" that drove me away from solus. I find it, in a word, excruciating.

livingsilver94

ermo

Here are my words on the topic:

Isn't this the exact point of continuous delivery (CD)? Like, is a certain PR OK for everyone (automated tests included)? Then merge. So, if I understood correctly, I'm all in for eliminating make publish. Let's automate everything and get into modern software development.

Although I think this can't spare users to test package updates on their system. Not for every single stupid bugfix release maybe, but majors should be manually verified. BUT! Only if the package compiled. This means we can let the build server build it, and then download the artifact for testing.

Ikey

Agree. Automatic build queue it is.

Ikey

livingsilver94 So the reason we wanted these build queues, and manifest diff checks, is so we can say with confidence that our source matches our binaries. Unequivocally. I'm in favour of that CD approach.

Ikey

Gavin I hadn't really thought about that tbh. It's only "locked" to eopkg in like 2 places where it runs some calls, so it's actually pretty portable and I don't think most people saw that.

Shame it's not in D... says the author. 😃

ReillyBrogan

Is Calamares really that locked into KDE? It looks like it just depends on some of the KDE Frameworks libraries, which we were going to package anyway. And there's no requirement for those libraries to be installed onto say a GNOME or Budgie system.

livingsilver94

ReillyBrogan I agree with you. One may think the library stack required by Calamares is big, and could very well be, but this will just increase ISO's size (by how much, however?). We're not forced to install the KDE libraries Calamares relies on.

I strongly advocate the usage of a middleware installer, running on machine code. Calamares is one.

der_eismann

What about anaconda? Has a GUI & text installer. On the other hand some projects are moving to a D-Bus based installer, this one also looks nice.

Gavin

der_eismann This looks interesting.

fw190d13

As far as I understand Manjaro is using Calamares even if I install the XFCE desktop.

ReillyBrogan

fw190d13 Nobara is also using Calamares even though it installs GNOME.

mcirsta

From a user's perspective I really liked Calamares when I used it and I think it's stable enough.
Probably a text installer could be adapted from Calamares but really for now I think most if not all of the installs will be made using the UI.
I think the deps on the UI are mostly for partitioning and stuff which is anyway hard to do in text mode.

ermo

I vote for the FreeBSD installer.

(>_>)

No, I am NOT being serious 😁

VexfulNiko

Crystal Linux has a installer (Crystal Linux is an arch-based distro)