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.langa...@ubuntu.com> To: ubuntu-de...@lists.ubuntu.com 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/ slanga...@ubuntu.com vor...@debian.org
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