DESIGN: Answer who this is for

This commit is contained in:
Colin Walters 2011-10-10 09:47:21 -04:00
parent 5a59c29371
commit 3c6e76da55
1 changed files with 26 additions and 2 deletions

28
DESIGN
View File

@ -9,8 +9,9 @@ hacktree-root-manager
== Problem statement ==
Hacking on the core operating system is painful. We want a system
that matches these requirements:
Hacking on the core operating system is painful - this includes most
of GNOME from upower and NetworkManager up to gnome-shell. I want a
system that matches these requirements:
0) Does not disturb your existing OS
1) Is not terribly slow to use
@ -31,6 +32,29 @@ jhbuild + OS packages:
this means you can't build NetworkManager, and thus are permanently
stuck on whatever the distro provides.
== Who is hacktree for? ==
First - operating system developers and testers. I specifically keep
a few people in mind - Dan Williams and Eric Anholt, as well as myself
obviously. For Eric Anholt, a key use case for him is being able to
try out the latest gnome-shell, and combine it with his work on Mesa,
and see how it works/performs - while retaining the ability to roll
back if one or both breaks.
The rollback concept is absolutely key for shipping anything to
enthusiasts or knowledable testers. With a system like this, a tester
can easily perform a local rollback - something just not well
supported by dpkg/rpm. (Why not Conary? AIUI Conary is targeted at
individual roots, so while you could roll back a given root, it would
use significantly more disk space than hacktree)
Also, distributing operating system trees (instead of packages) gives
us a sane place to perform automated QA **before** we ship it to
testers. We should never be wasting these people's time.
Even better, this system would allow testers to bisect across
operating system builds efficiently.
== The core idea ==
chroots are the original lightweight "virtualization". Let's use