On Wed, 2014-02-26 at 11:46 -0800, Adam Williamson wrote:
On Wed, 2014-02-26 at 11:17 +0100, Karel Zak wrote:
> 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.
We don't, really. Well, we do, but it really is "tools" plural, and some
of them don't have GUIs at all. blivet and its anaconda GUI really is
one of the most advanced partitioning tools in existence. There's no
one-stop graphical tool that does everything blivet/anaconda does,
AFAIK. gparted can't do anywhere near the LVM, RAID and btrfs stuff that
blivet does: it really only does *partitions*.
Just to let you know -- a guy from
Prague Technical University is
working on a bachelor thesis [1] focused on starting the development of
a GUI partitioning/LVM/RAID/BTRFS tool based on blivet that should be
embedable into other applications, Anaconda included.
We've kind of boxed ourselves into a corner of unreasonably high
expectations here now, though - we either commit to continuing to
support all the functionality custom part currently supports, or we say
"reduce it and screw the complainers", but there *will* be complainers.
There already are quite vociferous complainers for the very small amount
of simplification that was done between oldUI custom part and newUI
custom part.
Possibly the most viable long-term option, and I think one the devs are
gradually working towards, is to make the blivet GUI an independent
component. That would mean it wouldn't kill your whole anaconda run if
it crashed (you could just start over and try again), and you could use
it from outside of anaconda (say, to pre-partition). And it'd maybe
encourage other projects to adopt and contribute to it, which would
definitely help take the load off - I've said it before but I'll say it
again, it is kinda absurd that we have, what, about the equivalent of
1.5 full-time developers trying to maintain this extremely capable and
complex partitioning backend *and* frontend.
Another "let you know" --
I'm now starting to work on blivet for most of
my work hours, so it will hopefully soon be equivalent of 2.5 full-time
developers.
Also, we have already discussed splitting out the Custom partitioning
GUI into a separate tool with dlehman. I can soon (in March) jump on it
and I believe it should be feasible.
--
Vratislav Podzimek
Anaconda Rider | Red Hat, Inc. | Brno - Czech Republic