Base

File:Logo Base-working-group.png

Base Working Group Resources IRC: #fedora-base on freenode Mailing list: devel@lists.fedoraproject.org (with [Base] prefix) Meetings The Base working group meets weekly every Friday at 15:00 UTC in #fedora-meeting channel. Membership Harald Hoyer (haraldh) Dennis Gilmore (dgilmore) Jon Disnard (masta) Dan Walsh (dwalsh) Jaroslav Reznik (jreznik) Vaclav Pavlin (vpavlin) Michal Sekletar (msekleta)

This is the home for the Base working group, which is the team of people working on putting together the Fedora Base product.

Mission Statement

Statement

The goal of Fedora Base is to provide a standard platform with common technologies, frameworks and APIs for all Fedora products.

What is Base

In order to achieve this goal these are the actual more direct points to highlight what we try to achieve:

• Definition of the Base: Installer, compose tools, minimal install (for some definition there), and functionality the majority products want to use
• Based on feedback from other WGs, provide a API and/or ABI stability for a specific release rather than simply package versions/releases
• The experience from functionalities provided by Base are expected to be consistent across different Fedora products
• => Keep Base as small as possible while still providing functionality most of the products would use
• Release cycle and lifespan are still TBD and will be based on feedback by other WGs and their requirements (FESCO ticket)

What Base is NOT

A few things to clarify what we believe the Base Design should not be/do:

• Base is not a full product
  • => No DVD images
  • => Very limited comps (minimal and base currently)
  • => Only provides a bare bones sytem when installed
  • => May not even be a first-class installable item
• Other stuff... (TBD)

Details

As Base is supposed to deliver a basic platform for other products and we would like to keep it as small as possible in order for the derived products to be more flexible, the current idea is to work with a really small package set.

The current list of key packages for Base we see are:

• kernel
• rpm
• yum (to be replaced by dnf when it's ready)
• dracut
• systemd

as a minimal set of package and functionality. On top of that though we think Base should be self hosting and some installer backend framework should exist in Base so every product can rely on that. This would extend the list with:

• gcc
• anaconda or pungi (if only the framework for image generation is needed)

Using Fedora 20 as a baseline for repoqueries, this nets the following interesting results, all generated with

repoquery --arch=ppc64,noarch --requires --resolve --recursive

Key pkgs	# of req pkgs	link to pkglist
kernel rpm yum	125	pkglist
kernel rpm yum gcc	133	pkglist
kernel rpm yum gcc pungi	228	pkglist
kernel rpm yum gcc anaconda	713	pkglist

Use cases

Container

Need to change packaging rules to not require things like systemd or kernel.

rpm -q --whatrequires kernel
lldpad-0.9.46-3.fc20.x86_64
sysprof-1.2.0-4.fc20.x86_64
pulseaudio-4.0-8.gitf81e3.fc21.x86_64
libseccomp-2.1.1-0.fc21.x86_64
libguestfs-1.25.7-1.fc21.x86_64
systemtap-devel-2.4-1.fc21.x86_64
autofs-5.0.8-3.fc21.x86_64
systemtap-runtime-2.4-1.fc21.x86_64

rpm -q --whatrequires systemd | wc -l
110

Neither of these packages are required in a docker container.

Policies

Meeting Frequency and Times

• The Base working group meets on a weekly basis in the #fedora-meeting channel (announced no later than 24 hours before a meeting on the devel@lists.fedoraproject.org mailing list with [Base] prefix.
• If there is no agenda posted to the mailing list within 24 hours before a meeting is set to start, the meeting is cancelled and the group leader / FESCo liaison will send out a cancellation notice to the mailing list.
• The Base working group meets every Friday at 15:00 UTC
• In the case where a voting member can not make a meeting where a vote is scheduled to happen, they can either pre-vote via the mailing list or abstain-by-default.
• During meetings, silence indicates consent. If people disagree, then that will bring it to a vote.
• After meetings, meeting minutes will be sent to both the devel@lists.fedoraproject.org mailing list with [Base] prefix

Managing and Tracking Progress

• Working documents for the group will be stored here on the Fedora project wiki.
• Agenda items, decisions, and issues will also be stored here on the Fedora project wiki until which time the group decides it is not scalable and another tool would be more suitable.

Assets

Approved Documents

• Governance Charter for Base Working Group - To be submitted

Working Documents

• Use Cases for Fedora Base
• Personas (target users) for Fedora Base
• Short-Term Goals and Long-Term Goals for Fedora Base

Proposals

• Base Lifecycle Proposal
• Base Roles Proposal

Meeting Minutes

Date	Agenda	Blog Summary	Mailing List Thread	Raw Logs
Friday, November 8, 2013	Governance discussion & draft (Proposal: Review other WGs governance drafts & create our own based on those) Regular meeting times (stay with Friday 15:00 PM or move somewhere else?) Base mailing list discussion (yes/no, pros/cons) QE representation discussion (who, how, status, etc) Role of Base Design group discussion -> Start of collecting ideas for Base Design. Proposal: Use wiki Maybe something like a mission statement first that relates to the idea that the Base Design is the platform for all other direct Fedora products (there can potentially be other separate products based on our original products or others consuming Base in the future) Container technology	Minutes		Logs

Older meeting minutes ...