Platform vs Product [Was: Re: Moving w3m out of standard]

[Scott Kitterman]

On Monday 23 June 2008 17:31, Dustin Kirkland wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 23, 2008 at 10:03 AM, Soren Hansen <soren at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> > Alternate and the mini ISO will get you the same kernel.
>
> It would be nice if these two had "server" as a possible installation
> target (or "server-minimal" as the case may be), which installed the
> server kernel instead.  As well as an option on the Server install CD
> for a minimal installation (not default, but a target specifiable at
> boot time).
>
> --
>
> Beyond that, I like the way this conversation has turned...a
> productive discussion about the difference between an "Ubuntu Server
> Product", which is true to the spirit of "Linux for Human Beings (who
> happen to also be sysadmins)", as well as an "Ubuntu Server Minimal"
> installation, without the bells and whistles for the uber Ubuntu
> sysadmins (aka old school, die hard).
>
> :-Dustin

The major challenge is that as a product, there is no single Ubuntu Server.  
There are as many servers as there are use cases.  We can deal with this any 
of at least three ways:

1.  Provide the minimal system and tell people to make their own product.  
This will appeal to a certain market segment and is not hard to do.  I think 
as a community there is definite interest in this, but I suspect not a lot of 
Canonical support revenue.  I do think we ought to do this as it can serve 
(pun intended) as the basis for a lot of specific projects.

2.  Provide a mostly right for a number of common use cases, but still 
probabyl not exactly what you want, you'll have to tweak it.  This is, I 
would argue, what we provide today.  It's useful, but also needs some 
extentsion to use beyond a couple of very specific use cases.

3.  Provide a way to scalably provide a lot of different configurations for 
many specific use cases that doesn't require much additional configuration 
and sysadmin time.  I've proposed a spec for one approach to move in this 
direction:

https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/server-flavors

To get to a truly Ubuntu solution in servers, we are going to need something a 
lot more configurable than what we have now.

Scott K