manifest: Going purely virtual
At the moment, we don't have a "maintainer" or resources for testing gnome-ostree on physical hardware. While I definitely understand that the ability to do bare metal deployments of the latest GNOME could be very useful for many types of people, we can't recommend it until a few technical conditions are met: 1) We have testing coverage of our kernel build, particularly with respect to the various Linux filesystems. Otherwise we risk corrupting people's drives. 2) There is someone who will keep track of core graphics stack components like Mesa and we have infrastructure to validate updates across different hardware (i.e. we have physical laptops with Intel chips wired into a test framework) Besides technical, there are also political concerns: 1) Being purely virtual decreases the inherent conflict with our downstreams, and makes roles more clear. Downstreams are responsible for "hardware enablement". 2) Some components essential for some forms of hardware (mainly linux-firmware) have licensing terms not acceptable to all of our downstreams and partners (for firmware, the FSF). In return for solely targeting virtualization, efforts for the near-term future (at least a year) will focus heavily on more automated testing, which is extremely easy to do when validation is restricted to virtualized environments. Once we have an extensively tested system that runs well in qemu, free of error spew on startup, memory leaks, and the like, then we can look at what it would take to add in physical hardware targets.
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