17:39:39 <adamw> i guess this is because 'burner macs' are rare
Adam gets this right. Mac users by and large have no concept of OS testing. Only recently is there a public beta test program. Developers by and large test their application for compatibility, rather than testing OS installation - but even in pre-release testing, installer problems are rare. In a decade of testing, I can't think of a single bug I've hit in Apple's installer.
This is pretty much a case of in for a penny, in for a pound. Fedora contributes specialized QA people who can do this work correctly. And out of that you get defectors from Appleland who hopefully write some cool stuff or contribute in ways they otherwise wouldn't.
Now, in the Go, No Go meeting logs there's this idea of changing the criterion to take the form of a Hippocratic Oath, "do no harm" to macOS, rather than guarantee a successful installation of Fedora. This is further elaborated by noting even if the criterion is done away with, there's still a concern over the vary narrow path to data loss, and that alone is reason to block. And so now I can't help but think of this years old bug:
In that bug, two macOS users actually do in fact experience unrecoverable data loss. It's not hypothetical at all. QA said it was a blocker. Upstream said it's not. And therefore it's not a blocker. So there's general consensus to block on hypothetical data loss bugs when installing on Macs, but with proven data loss we can't be bothered with users who do this, it's their own fault for having trusted the installer.
This is actually the bug that has made me walk back my installer testing. I find bugs and I try not to report them. I don't think the installer can be made better anymore. I don't think I've helped users with my hundreds of hours of testing the intstaller, intstead I think I've hurt users my helping to incentivizing feature creap and code churn that makes the installer complex and buggy. That project is a classic case of having bitten off more than it can chew. It can't QA its own code sufficiently before it gets into Fedora, and then even Fedora can't QA it fast enough to avoid bugs like this one, and the one this thread is about, and many other blocker bugs that go disproportionately to the installer.
So yea sure, more canaries.
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Chris Murphy