On 22 March 2014 17:06, Patrick O'Callaghan <pocallaghan(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On Sat, 2014-03-22 at 16:40 +0000, Liam Proven wrote:
> As I have said previously, I have /never/ successfully installed
> Fedora on actual hardware since v1.0 shipped in, what was it, 2003? I
> have installed Haiku, Aros, FreeBSD, PC BSD, dozens of Linux distros,
> Windows 2 through 8, SCO Xenix, SCO Unix, OpenSolaris, OpenVMS,
> FreeDOS, DR-DOS, MS-DOS, PC-DOS, OS/2 1 through eComStation 2, MacOS 6
> through OS X 10.9. I am *not* a newbie and I am *not* an inexperienced
> inexpert fumbler.
I know you've said this before but I still find it astonishing. I've
used Fedora since FC1 and have never failed to install it or update it
on real hardware (and not always the same real hardware). Once or twice
I've had issues with the layout (in fact I had some with F20 when it
decided I wanted a BTRFS subvolume spread over two disks) but they've
been the exception. I do agree that the installer needs to be clearer
than it is, though I find F20 better than F19.
I'm not questioning your experience, I just find it remarkably different
from my own.
I've had similar experiences myself - where stuff that works really
easily and simply for me just doesn't for others, or collapses or
explodes in legion bizarre errors and so on.
The thing is, edge cases like this are really informative. It's really
hard to trace an obscure intermittent bug and it's really hard to file
a useful bug report when the bug is "it doesn't work for me" and you
can't really add more data than that.
But if you have a whole bunch of users saying "this doesn't work for
me" or "I find this really hard" or "this program can't give me
the
options I want", then that to me seems like a big obvious signal that
something is badly wrong and needs examination and possibly
re-consideration.
It's not much use for tracing a particular bug - chances are that for
everyone who's failed to install an instance of F20, the reason is
different. There's no one bug to file.
In this case, for instance, I'd point the accusing finger at the
installer developers' assumptions that:
[a] on a system with 2 disks, either of those disks can be usefully
analysed by the install program in isolation. That's an invalid
assumption and the result is a program that can't handle many common
instances.
[b] that one will want to install the bootloader on the MBR of the
drive with the root filesystem. That's an invalid assumption, too.
[c] that one will want to install a bootloader into an MBR and nowhere
else. That's an invalid assumption.
[d] that on a system with multiple Linux installs, you can group sets
of partitions by install - in other words, these ones belong to
install #1, these to install #2, these to install #3. That's invalid
for me - I share /home and swap between all my installs. Only the root
FS is unique to each. That breaks F20's installer.
These are not bugs. These are design errors, where someone has assumed
that their personal preconceptions are universal truths.
--
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