On Fri, Feb 21, 2014 at 02:04:54PM -0800, Adam Williamson wrote:
On Fri, 2014-02-21 at 16:38 -0500, John.Florian(a)dart.biz wrote:
> > With the best of intentions, we'd gone from a reluctant exception to the
> > 'no choice' design to a dropdown which included two very different
> > complex choices: LVM and btrfs. So now the installer path which was
> > originally supposed to be minimal-choice, very robust and testable and
> > fixable, had become rather a lot more complex.
>
> Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.
I don't think that precept applies very well to this area.
The problem is that there are - and this is probably *literal*, not a
rhetorical flourish - millions of Special Little Use Cases like yours
(the one below, snipped for brevity) out there. *You* want it to be easy
to skip /home. *She* wants it to be easy to resize a Slackware install.
*That guy* wants to use btrfs. *My cat* likes RAID. It is becoming very,
very clear that we just cannot undertake to support them all and
guarantee that they are all going to work in a release. It's just _too
much work_. Everyone agrees that it would be nice if we could, but then
everyone agrees that it'd be nice if I had a solid gold toilet. Some
nice things just don't happen. We do not have the resources to be in the
business of writing the world's biggest disk configuration tool and
guaranteeing that it'll never go wrong, which isn't *quite* what we're
currently trying to do, but it's not far from it.
Don't try to be smart to everyone, it does not work. IMHO all you
need is to support one or a very few scenarios (complete scenarios
without customization) and a way how to switch from installer
to manual partitioning by parted/fdisk/mdadm/mkfs/etc.
The anaconda partitioning UI will never be smart enough for
advanced users and it also does not make sense to duplicate effort,
we *already have* tools to create all the unusual crazy disk layouts.
Karel
--
Karel Zak <kzak(a)redhat.com>
http://karelzak.blogspot.com