Bug 1222797

Yes. That's intentional. There was a bug report (that actually should have been a Jira feature) to request exactly this: bug #1221742.

As heavy user of that bespoken system role, that makes me really sad.

Maybe MicroOS or their desktop versions for GNOME or KDE are better suited for your use case.

https://microos.opensuse.org/blog/2023-05-27-microOS-Desktop-is-changing-names/

(In reply to Stefan Hundhammer from comment #3)
> Maybe MicroOS or their desktop versions for GNOME or KDE are better suited
> for your use case.

My use case is a transactional server without a GUI and I use this heavily wherever I can, since years. So, no, neither of those are viable alternatives.

https://bugzilla.suse.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1221742 is only for Tumbleweed, see https://bugzilla.suse.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1221742#c34.

Does this still apply for SLES15-SP6/Leap15.6 then? If so, does this also mean there won't be a Transactional Server Module for 15-SP6, as it was for 15-SP5?

Also what happens to existing 15-SP5/Leap 15.5 server installed with this role?

(In reply to Felix Niederwanger from comment #5)
> (In reply to Stefan Hundhammer from comment #3)
> > Maybe MicroOS or their desktop versions for GNOME or KDE are better suited
> > for your use case.
> 
> My use case is a transactional server without a GUI and I use this heavily
> wherever I can, since years. So, no, neither of those are viable
> alternatives.

You can use MicroOS Leap without a DE:
https://get.opensuse.org/leapmicro/5.5/

(In reply to Felix Niederwanger from comment #6)
> https://bugzilla.suse.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1221742 is only for Tumbleweed,
> see https://bugzilla.suse.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1221742#c34.
> 
> Does this still apply for SLES15-SP6/Leap15.6 then? If so, does this also
> mean there won't be a Transactional Server Module for 15-SP6, as it was for
> 15-SP5?

The Transactional Server was never supported on SLES15 and always only TechPreview, for which you needed a support agreement with us. PM told me no customer did ever ask for that.

(In reply to Felix Niederwanger from comment #5)
> (In reply to Stefan Hundhammer from comment #3)
> > Maybe MicroOS or their desktop versions for GNOME or KDE are better suited
> > for your use case.
> 
> My use case is a transactional server without a GUI and I use this heavily
> wherever I can, since years. So, no, neither of those are viable
> alternatives.

Transactional Server is MicroOS with some never adjusted Tumbleweed/Leap code, so MicroOS is a viable, logical and better alternative.

(In reply to Pavin Joseph from comment #7)

> You can use MicroOS Leap without a DE:
> https://get.opensuse.org/leapmicro/5.5/

Leap Micro has very narrowed down repositories and requires every workload to be containerized by the user. That's a completely different use case than a generic server with transactional updates.

We even advertise nowadays SL Micro as a specialized system contrary to the generic server.

So no, this does not fit at all.

(In reply to Thorsten Kukuk from comment #8)
> The Transactional Server was never supported on SLES15 and always only
> TechPreview, for which you needed a support agreement with us. PM told me no
> customer did ever ask for that.

Wait, it was never supported despite a dedicated extension available?

Also: Maintenance uses it on various servers, so we have at least one internal customer that asks for it.

Given that this worked just fine since at least Leap 15.4, would it be a viable option to continue releasing it with the hitherto (non)-support until SLES/Leap 16? Given that at least some of our workflows depend on this role, such alterations within the lifecycle of the SLES15 line are rather disappointing. We would be prepared to bigger changes when switching to SLES/Leap 16 then.

(In reply to Felix Niederwanger from comment #10)
> Leap Micro has very narrowed down repositories and requires every workload
> to be containerized by the user. That's a completely different use case than
> a generic server with transactional updates.

MicroOS Leap and TW tracks the same repos as regular Leap and TW:
https://en.opensuse.org/Portal:MicroOS/Zypper

MicroOS has a read-only root filesystem and so did the transactional server role.
So any user packages had to be containerized and system packages had to be layered/installed in the base image (btrfs snapshot) using transactional-update.

Appears the same to me. Sorry, what am I missing here? 🤔

(In reply to Pavin Joseph from comment #12)

> Appears the same to me. Sorry, what am I missing here? 🤔

You don't have any on-system tools or services, everything needs to be containerized on SLE/Leap Micro.

Try to install e.g. a samba, it's not available in the Leap Micro/SLE Micro repositories. Don't get confused with MicroOS - on MicroOS you can, because it uses the Tumbleweed repos. On SLE/Leap Micro you cannot.

SLE/Leap Micro is not a generic server and only hold very minimal repositories by design, because it expects all workloads to be containerized. If that's not your match, you cannot use it as generic server.

Guys, I'm, mot sure if Bugzilla is the best tool for discussing this, but ... maybe others are interested too and there is another way. Forum, something else?

For reporting this as an Installer bug, the resolution INVALID is valid, because it was actually requested this way.

For reporting this as a product decision issue, you may still reopen and assign to someone with the decision taking power about this. That is not us - YaST Team.

Please allow me one last question on the topic: Why do we have a transactional server module for 15-SP6, but not for Leap 15.6?

See https://openqa.suse.de/tests/13958201#step/register_module_transactional/1

This was an agreed decision.

We've agreed to drop it as it makes no sense from technical perspective.
It was recommended by Thorsten Kukuk. Nobody really uses it on Leap 15.X

Everybody on code-stream 15.X / openSUSE should simply simply use LeapMicro, which has supportive services that actually make it nicely integrated.

(In reply to Felix Niederwanger from comment #15)
> Please allow me one last question on the topic: Why do we have a
> transactional server module for 15-SP6, but not for Leap 15.6?

The transactional server module for 15-SP6 is still techpreview and you need written permission from PM to use it.
That's why we know that nobody is using it.

(In reply to Felix Niederwanger from comment #13)

> Try to install e.g. a samba, it's not available in the Leap Micro/SLE Micro
> repositories. Don't get confused with MicroOS - on MicroOS you can, because
> it uses the Tumbleweed repos. On SLE/Leap Micro you cannot.

You can add the samba devel project or the Leap repositories and install from there.
The result is the same like with the transactional server role:
if it works for you, you have luck. If it does not work, bad luck for you.
Because of missing customer interest, we never verified and adjusted more packages than we need on SLE Micro/LeapMicro.

(In reply to Thorsten Kukuk from comment #18)
> You can add the samba devel project or the Leap repositories and install
> from there.
> The result is the same like with the transactional server role:
> if it works for you, you have luck. If it does not work, bad luck for you.
> Because of missing customer interest, we never verified and adjusted more
> packages than we need on SLE Micro/LeapMicro.

Hehe, I do already run a bunch of Franken-Leap-Micro instances, and so far rather successfully, but that's a different topic ;-)

Thanks for the comments, let's close this topic otherwise Lukas gets annoyed.

*** Bug 1226822 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

A possible workaround is to install transactional Leap 15.5 and then upgrade it to 15.6.

*** Bug 1227260 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***