Using the Cockpit-based custom storage workflow in webui, the burger menu shows a "Create Stratis pool" entry. If you click this, it tells you stratisd needs to be installed, spends a few seconds checking for it, then offers to install it. We probably do not want this behaviour. We don't generally want things trying to install packages in live environments. It *does* work to some degree, but it's not exactly supported - it works until you run out of RAM, because "installed packages" can only be stored in RAM. I also am concerned what would happen with this if we tried webUI on a dedicated installer image. Do we want to expose Stratis storage in Fedora? If we do, we should make sure all necessary packages are available in installer environments (by adding them to appropriate comps groups). If not, we probably need a way to signal to cockpit not to show this option?
It is easy for Cockpit not to show this option when the package is missing. As you pointed out, first we should think whether we want to show Stratis in Fedora installation. If we do, we just need to include the required package otherwise Cockpit team can easily hide this.
Blivet GUI did not support stratis yet either https://github.com/storaged-project/blivet-gui/pull/277, so let's hide the options in the dropdown when the requirements are not installed (in anaconda mode) For future RFE for stratis on WebUI we can use another tracker.
Well, we might want Cockpit to continue to have the "offer to install stratisd" behaviour *on installed systems*, no? It only seems wrong for the installer environment. Can we set it up that way?
@Adam yes - this is the suggestion. Cockpit storage has a 'anaconda mode' detection in the source code, and does quite a lot of conditionalizing already. This 'anaconda mode' is enabled when the anaconda runtime configuration file is detected.
There is one more problem with this, specific on Live media - even if Cockcpit does pull in the dependencies, avoiding the various pitfalls like running out of RAM or lack of network connectivity - *the same dependencies won't be present on the installed system* ! Live media installation basically rsyncs the RO base layer of the Live image, it won't pull in any runtime changes done to the image rootfs during installation & it won't install any RPMs either (as we don't have any support for mixing different installation payloads right now). So I think this should be definitely disabled in the "Anaconda mode", at least for now.
This got fixed in https://github.com/cockpit-project/cockpit/pull/20950 and is part of release 324.