Fedora QA No Longer Needs To Test Physical CD/DVD Media As Part Of Their Formal Release Process

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Fedora QA No Longer Needs To Test Physical CD/DVD Media As Part Of Their Formal Release Process

This morning's Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) meeting approved more changes for this spring's release of Fedora 32...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...No-CD-DVD-Test

[NotMine999]

Once you stop testing a feature, the risk of it breaking only increases as time goes on.

Said another way, just because it works today, don't assume that it will work the same way tomorrow.

[stormcrow]

Once you stop testing a feature, the risk of it breaking only increases as time goes on.

Said another way, just because it works today, don't assume that it will work the same way tomorrow.

I think this is more of a matter of giving a green light to ISO sizes larger than the typical DVD +/- RW sizes than it is the ISO images themselves being broken. Not much different than when Ubuntu stopped blocking on ISO sizes larger than CD-R media.

[betam4x]

I envision distros going away within 10 years as technologies like snap, flatpack, and appimage become available.

I will argue that one only needs gnu core utils + libc + the Linux kernel included in a distro along with snap/flatpack/appimage dependencies.

[CommunityMember]

Once you stop testing a feature, the risk of it breaking only increases as time goes on.

Absolutely. But as the ISO image is still used for VM installation (which is tested) one is likely to encounter breakage only on the more obscure hardware systems(*), which now users that actually have, and care about installing directly from DVD on, are expected to test during the beta cycle and raise bugs. So, as they say, if anyone found an installation bug, speak now, or forever hold your peace.

(*) Such as systems no longer being sold, and while if one looks at the entire Fedora community, there are certainly people running 10+ year old systems, they now have to pick up some of the testing rather than expecting the Fedora team to keep systems of that age running for testing. As I recall, one case which typically causes the most angst are old 32-bit only UEFI systems (on x86-64 hardware) that can only boot from DVD.

[onicsis]

I read often DVDs. But never in the recent years used a optical media to boot, always copying or installing ISOs on USB sticks. Yes there is an exception qemu or other virtual machine. Works "out of the box" with any ISO image, any OS from DOS to the latest versions of Windows or Linux.

[Sluthy]

I often still burn CD/DVDs when installing or trying distros, mostly because I can never seem to get USBs to boot. Whether I use unetbootin or dd or whatever, it's very hit or miss whether it actually becomes bootable - assuming the PC I'm trying it in even supports USB boot, which is not a given even with semi-recent hardware. Optical media burned from an ISO, however, "Just Works"™.

[caligula]

Sticking with ISO seems rather silly considering that the image won't fit on CD/DVD (ok, maybe double layer DVD-R). The fact is, other boot media won't even require using ISO disk format. In fact they totally ignore all the ISO9660 structures in the image.

[AndyChow]

(*) Such as systems no longer being sold, and while if one looks at the entire Fedora community, there are certainly people running 10+ year old systems, they now have to pick up some of the testing rather than expecting the Fedora team to keep systems of that age running for testing. As I recall, one case which typically causes the most angst are old 32-bit only UEFI systems (on x86-64 hardware) that can only boot from DVD.

I have some hardware which is x86-64 non-UEFI (legacy BIOS only), and it can only boot from DVD (or a PXE, but it's with a weird nVidia build ethernet controller. Yes, nVidia does make ethernet controllers called nForce and IME doesn't work well).

Sticking with ISO seems rather silly considering that the image won't fit on CD/DVD (ok, maybe double layer DVD-R). The fact is, other boot media won't even require using ISO disk format. In fact they totally ignore all the ISO9660 structures in the image.

I'm not sure I understand how it won't fit. The Fedora workstation install iso is 1.8G, the server install is 2.0G and the network boot one is 650M. The last one should fit on a CD, the previous will all fit on a single layer DVD. If there was a distro where the install media was larger, they could make disk1, disk2, etc. 'a la Debian. With blu-ray, I think you can have up to 4 layers, so a disk is 100G. With Debian, you only use the first disk anyway, unless you have a machine that does not have networking.

I think every distro should at least have testing on an iso network boot image, but in the event that they don't, anyone could as last resort install a previous release and upgrade. This isn't BSD where upgrading from one release to another requires rebuilding the world from source code.

[set135]

The idea here is that they use the same image[*] for burning to optical media and for usb booting. So in *theory* if it works for usb it should be fine for dvd. But because optical media is becoming antiquated, and resources are finite, they are not going to stop the world to test/fix a potential optical boot problem.
* https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/11285.html