On Tue 22 Jan 2013 01:13:44 PM EST, Matt Rose wrote: > Even with this trust and knowledge, I was still worried *as hell*, that > every click of the mouse in the storage spoke would do something > irretrievably awful, like wipe my windows partition. > > I think the trepidation comes from the "Hub and Spoke" model. It's an > entirely new paradigm in OS installation (as far as I know), and the > idea of operations happening in parallel, while welcome, is so far from > the comfort zone of even people experienced with anaconda and OS > installation in general that it introduces an almost irrational fear. I am hoping that with some kind of minor adjustments we can make it clear you're stuff isn't at risk - reducing the terror that comes with working with storage in the installer was one of the motivations behind hub & spoke. I think maybe you've got a bit of a misconception as to how it works? It is not performing storage tasks in parallel. What it's doing is queuing up commands to execute the storage scheme you're planning out. Nothing is committed until you finish the storage spoke and hit 'Begin Installation.' That's the clear point of no return. In the old installer, you'd hit the point of no return I *think* before you even entered the custom partitioning screen. In this new model, you can play around a bit without risk to the underlying data, and you can go back to the storage spoke and redo it as much as you'd like before needing to commit. > In short, in the storage spoke, can you put a note on every pane saying > what action clicking the "Continue" button will trigger, and what, if > any permanent effects will result. If there are no permanent effects of > clicking "Continue", please indicate that, as well. I think that would be excessive. We certainly could have better explanatory text on some of the screens tho - the problem was the string freeze deadline tied us up this release so simply adding an explanatory line to a screen was pretty much not possible. Maybe what would work better here is on the very first hub screen, the main menu, we had a message at the top, "Please configure your install as desired using the menu items below. Nothing will be committed to disk until you proceed by clicking on the 'Begin Installation' button" or something like that. Would a message like that up front have eased your mind a bit better? > > I know this seems awfully repetitive, but I think it would help people > to accept this radically different approach. > > For those of you that need a happy ending, Fedora 18 Anaconda is > actually far better than any previous version. > > I have a very weird disk setup in my desktop (boot off of sdb, OS > partitions on sdb, and most data on sda), and where most Fedora installs > would be subtly broken, Fedora 18 has been running flawlessly. > > Kudos to everyone who worked so hard on this. I'm so, so very happy to hear you had a good experience in the end. The developers who worked on this are hands-down amazing. I know the release slipped a bit, but honestly even with the slippage it's kind of unbelievable the amount of work they got done in the little time period they had on top of maintaining previous releases, etc. ~m _______________________________________________ Anaconda-devel-list mailing list Anaconda-devel-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/anaconda-devel-list
