My opinion: shrug.

There is hardware that does not support booting from USB. I had to deal with a Lenovo laptop: to install the OS on it, I had to use DVD.

There is hardware that does not support booting from USB.

Do we have details of what hardware that includes, and what other alternatives there are to USB?

The gist of the proposal is that any bugs related to optical media creation and successful booting of them, would be non-blocking for release. There's no change in how they will be created, so they ought to work.

Maybe I'm not familiar enough with QA, but I find the proposal slightly concerning. If we say that optical can be used with Fedora, but don't have quality requirements, isn't that just setting people up to have a bad experience?

In my mind, we should either support features and ensure that they are good quality, or not support them.

This is particularly important if the features relate to OS installation, where failure can be potentially catastrophic.

It would be better to discuss on the list in one place:
https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/devel@lists.fedoraproject.org/thread/FSRXYXL4ECPLUA7LGTINQDI5MN67LHYC/

I've written a long summarizing email here:
https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/devel@lists.fedoraproject.org/message/LRWHTSROHYAVN4ELQVZ5PIG6LCU6ROTV/

But I'll reply here as well.

If we say that optical can be used with Fedora, but don't have quality requirements, isn't that just setting people up to have a bad experience?

People might have a bad experience, sure. But most likely they won't. Plus newcomers are likely to use a USB drive, because https://getfedora.org only mentions guides for creating a bootable USB drive (and offers Fedora Media Writer), and you have to dig deep to actually find DVD instructions.

In my mind, we should either support features and ensure that they are good quality, or not support them.

If by "not support them" you mean remove all functionality to allow booting from optical media, then that would be a very poorly received idea. We want to stop blocking the release on optical boot errors. We do not aim to prevent people from using it, and we expect that the functionality will work just fine in years to come. We can't test every functionality for every niche group of users, but there is no reason why we would actively block such users from installing and using Fedora. This is not about a software app which you can replace with another if your e.g. CPU/GPU is unsupported. This is the entry point for using the whole system. So '100% guaranteed or nothing' would be the wrong approach here.

This is particularly important if the features relate to OS installation, where failure can be potentially catastrophic.

The failure of optical boot is not catastrophic, either you'll boot or you won't. It will not eat your machine.

Discussed during today's meeting: come up with a cohesive statement on this issue as working group, and include in the FESCo ticket for their consideration of the change proposal.

Draft
The Workstation working group agrees with Fedora QA Team's assessment that the physical optical media use case is sufficiently uncommon, and are not concerned about the loss of test coverage as it pertains to this change proposal. We are, however, concerned about the Project producing optical media for marketing purposes. In our assessment, the user experience will be poor due to the slow performance of optical drives. It is our strong preference that Fedora Workstation only be distributed on USB flash media, and funds be found to support this effort.

Ack/nack/patch on the draft statement above? FESCo is scheduled to meet tomorrow, and has optical media on their agenda, although I'm not certain if they're going decide it tomorrow.

Ack

Do we have details of what hardware that includes, and what other alternatives there are to USB?

@aday Lenovo G580 in my case. I could not boot from USB and had to use DVD.

@hakavlad I consider it a betrayal by the manufacturer, not following specs, and not fixing obvious bugs. I think we can only make a best effort to support such cases. Based on this forum thread, I'd suggest it might be one of those rare cases where it's better to use legacy booting, which allows USB boot.
https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/Lenovo-B-and-G-Series-Notebooks/G580-2189-does-not-boot-from-USB-or-DVD/td-p/912341

It may also be that booting in UEFI mode would work if the USB stick were differently formatted, rather than the complex multiple isohybrid partition used by Fedora ISO images. Those might cause firmware confusion, where a strict GPT or MBR scheme on a USB stick might work. We don't have a plain MBR + FAT16 bootable image.

@chrismurphy, OK to close this? We've determined that this criterion is not important for Workstation and It's in FESCo's court from here, right?

Agreed. Closing.