On Mar 21, 2014, at 6:18 PM, Liam Proven <lproven(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 21 March 2014 23:25, Chris Murphy <lists(a)colorremedies.com>
wrote:
> Ahh, so when hyperbole simply isn't going far enough we actually have to descend
into the obviously ridiculous, as in, worthy of ridicule. My house plant can do a Fedora
install with this installer. That you keep failing to get any kind of successful
installation is a bit amusing. Maybe you need more water?
Firstly, your mocking hectoring tone is very unhelpful, annoying and
is not a productive way to engage.
Are you asserting that people who bitch and whine about the installer are entitled to a
monopoly on mocking hectoring tone; and unhelpful, annoying, unproductive engagement?
Secondly, I can confirm this finding. I was completely unable to
install F20 using the current installer program. My system has 2
drives - a 1TB HD and a 120GB SSD. The SSD holds Ubuntu and Win7; the
1TB drive holds /home, swap, a dedicated Windows swap partition, a
Windows data drive, and 2 spare unused root partitions for test
distros.
This is /not/ a very complex layout - there is no RAID, no LVM, no
GPT, nothing hairy or difficult.
It is actually a complex layout. Most of the world's installers can't deal with
what you just described. The #1 OS install today is software restore: point to a physical
device (assuming it even supports more than one which many don't), and it obliterates
all data on the drive, partitions it in a predefined way, installs predefined software.
You have no control other than the binary condition: do or do not.
The #2 OS install is the Windows retail/update installer. It mainly expects to install to
a blank drive, but has an advanced mode that permits rudimentary partitioning, including
partition deletion and install to free space. But no resizing. #3 OS install is OS X, it
only permits the selection of one pre-formatted volume, you have to use a separate utility
if you want to do any partitioning.
And yes, it's fair to bring up what money bags companies with more money and resources
than god. Because this is an area where they've all considered what you're
describing, is an edge case. Not common at all.
The Fedora 20 installer's default/easy/guided/auto path installs to free space. Yet it
has more options and outcomes than the total number of all possible options in both the
Windows and OS X installers combined.
Hmm. Now I believe you were just about to cite a bugzilla ID describing the above
behavior?
The F20 installer was completely unable to understand it and allow
me
to install a complete system. Assigned some 250GiB of space, it said
that it needed 6.5GB and there wasn't enough room.
I've done hundreds of hours of installer testing over the last year. It has been
really frustrating. This is the most complicated/capable installer I've ever worked
with other than maybe the OpenSUSE installer. Out of the gate it offerred too much
compared to the time/resources allotted for QA, debugging, and code changes needed.
The reality is, you get either stability or you get features. You don't get both. The
mantra for the new installer was about getting as many of old installer's features
into the new one as soon as possible, and stability was simply expected to have to take a
hit in order to do that. And that's exactly what happened.
Let's pretend the installer could only do 20% of what the old installer did, yet it
was almost bullet proof - never crashed, didn't have any of the logic problems
you're talking about, and so on. Would Fedora users have understood that trade off?
Maybe a lot of them would have. But then we'd have a lot of others pining for a right
to a GUI that lets them create some of the most esoteric storage layouts of all time.
And guess what? That has to be coded, and ostensibly should be tested. And quite frankly
the QA resources are really limited. Not every possible combination permitted in Manual
Partitioning is tested at all. That's how much it can do. It's nearly unlimited
possibilities because, guess another thing, I've never once seen it disqualify a drive
layout from the start. I've never seen it look at a crazy layout and go "umm
yeah, no please use gparted and obliterate this drive first." But I've seen that
many times with the OS X installer: flat out refusal, "go format the drive in Disk
Utility." Quite a few times when trying to prepare a drive for dual boot on OS X
I've seen the error message that the disk can't be partitioned, and that I had to
obliterate the whole drive and reinstall OS X from scratch in order to install Windows
side by side. So really, anaconda is extremely tolerant and I think that's something
of a problem too. It probably should be disqualifying a lot of nut case layouts, and just
saying no.
In trying to install, it erased one of the spare-root partitions and
was unable to recreate it in the available empty space.
And you have a bug for this? It's *really* difficult to get the installer to
inadvertently delete partitions. It requires two clicks: selection, then deletion. For
guided partitioning, the button is labeled "delete" whereas the button in manual
partitioning is labeled as a minus symbol.
One thing that some people don't easily grok is that Manual Partitioning isn't
partitioning oriented. It's mount point oriented. And that's because mount points
can be partitions, subvolumes, logical volumes, or md block devices. It's not correct
to call all of those things partitions. But all of them ultimately are assigned mount
points. This is a top down view, rather than the typical bottom up view where you always
have partitions, and then maybe you have raid devices or LVs or subvolumes. The idea is to
think less about the details of the layout and more about the outcome you want.
This is understandably confusing if you're really familiar with storage stack
creation. But most people aren't. Nevertheless, one of the first steps is drive
selection, which is about the most bottom layer there is. And then the very next step is
the top most layer, which are the mount points. So it's an unexpected context shift
from bottom to top, seemingly without any conversation about what's happening in the
middle. It's a different approach.
If you remain attached that what you're doing in Manual Partitioning is in fact
partitioning, you'll continue to be frustrated.
It *is* broken and it *is* unusable. "Well it works for me" is *not*
an adequate reply.
I didn't say "well it works for me" I said it's ridiculous to say
it's impossible to use. And I'll partly walk that back because if you're going
to be entitled to stubborness, and unwilling to adapt to the layouts you can have rather
than the layout you want, then yes you might be hitting a brick wall. But I assure you
that the vast majority of the world's installers would have poo poo'd you much
sooner.
Now, if you didn't file a bug about your anecdote, I want you to imagine me staring at
you with a look of "really?" Because this much effort complaining yet no bug
report? How exactly do you expect it to get better?
Chris Murphy