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Fedora Silverblue issue tracker
https://fedoraproject.org/atomic-desktops/silverblue/
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Package Parity With Fedora Workstation #457

Open DEM0NAssissan7 opened 1 year ago

DEM0NAssissan7 commented 1 year ago

All of the following packages are installed on Fedora Workstation by default, and this is an attempt to bring Silverblue to package parity as much as possible to Workstation.

METHOD: I looked at the package differences between Fedora Workstation and Silverblue in a diff viewer, after uninstalling all GUI application RPMs in Workstation that have been replaced with a Flatpak in Silverblue. From there, I pruned and cut until I arrived at packages that should be moved over from workstation.

  1. What problem are you trying to solve with this package? Or what functionality does the package provide? I am attempting to solve issues of Silverblue not having system feature parity compared to Workstation. Hopefully, at least some of the packages from this list will improve the overall experience of Silverblue and should hopefully reduce the number of issues with the project.

  2. Can the tool(s) provided by the package be helpful in debugging container runtime issues? Technically, yes. abrt can, but it is not directly designed for it.

  3. Can the tool(s) provided by the package be helpful in debugging networking issues? Yes. net-tools, abrt, and traceroute.

  4. Is it possible to layer the packages locally via rpm-ostree install <package>? Yes, but these packages belong in the stock image as they are intended to be core operating system packages that are included in the Fedora desktop.

NOTE: Every single package listed below is installed BY DEFAULT on Fedora Workstation. None of these are third-party or something outside of Workstation. These are all entirely from a freshly created Fedora 38 Workstation image using the latest ISO on the fedoraproject.org website with absolutely 0 installations to the system.

I am going to present my list of packages and their function/reason. I will attempt to order from most critical to most vain.

nvme-cli (NVME hardware control command line utility):

abrt and gnome-abrt (GNOME Problem Reporting app):

iscsi-initiator-utils (iSCSI server daemon and utilities):

grub2-tools-extra (Tools for grub recovery):

traceroute (Network trace utility):

symlinks (Symbolic links management):

net-tools (Network tools set):

tcpdump (network activity monitor):

Here are some additional application I saw in the diff that I did not exactly recognize, but may be useful to remind the developers of thier existence in Workstation and perhaps they can decide if they are good for Silverblue:

The following are extra packages I found IN Silverblue that are NOT in Workstation and that are not related to containers, rpm-ostree, or grub2:

replace libcurl with libcurl-minimal:

Sorry for such a long list. I went as absolutely deep as I possibly could and I spent hours on this post. Hopefully through it we can expand Silverblue's functionality and parity with Workstation, and maybe reduce some bloat along the way.

Major major props to the Silverblue developers for keeping Silverblue yet so similar to Workstation. I expected far more functional differences. Again, amazing job guys!

travier commented 1 year ago

Thanks for the list! We'll have to evaluate all of those one by one to see why we excluded them in the first place.

tpopela commented 1 year ago

First of all, thank you for the list! Just some quick notes:

abrt and gnome-abrt (GNOME Problem Reporting app):

* Help Fedora to get more bug and crash reports

* Silverblue should have error reporting, especially considering that it is a smaller project than Workstation. The more reports, the better.

* Provides extra functionality like `squashfs-tools`, `kexec-tools`, `gdb-headless`, ctags, `source-highlight`, elfutils, and xmlrpc (which are all dependencies of `abrt`).

* 46 M for the app + all dependencies

See https://github.com/fedora-silverblue/issue-tracker/issues/283 and https://pagure.io/fedora-workstation/issue/130 (Workstation, but related).

The following are extra packages I found IN Silverblue that are NOT in Workstation and that are not related to containers, rpm-ostree, or grub2:

totem-video-thumbnailer (Video thumbnail generator)
evince-thumbnailer & evince-previewer

These are there on purpose so you can see thumbnails in Nautilus as Flatpaks of these applications are not able to provide it as regular RPMs with Evince or Totem, see https://github.com/fedora-silverblue/issue-tracker/issues/98

DEM0NAssissan7 commented 1 year ago

These are there on purpose so you can see thumbnails in Nautilus as Flatpaks of these applications are not able to provide it as regular RPMs with Evince or Totem

I see. These packages are just fillers for file thumbnail functionality provided by Evince and Totem. Clever that you guys separated them out into their own packages instead of bloating the system with them. Smart thinking. Goes to show the effort that goes into Silverblue.

DEM0NAssissan7 commented 1 year ago

One package that I would suggest adding is kexec-tools as it is missing in Silverblue, but present in Workstation. Kexec is pretty important for users who Silverblue machines that need high availability (think mainframes and production systems).

kexec-tools:

JamesBelchamber commented 1 year ago

This mirrors a discussion in #289 about applications, which is relevant but distinct.

DEM0NAssissan7 commented 1 year ago

Is there any progress on this issue? It's been idle for about a month and it seems like a trivial thing to take care of, but I may be entirely wrong and this is much more complicated than I thought it was.