On Mar 21, 2014, at 6:18 PM, Liam Proven <lproven@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On 21 March 2014 23:25, Chris Murphy <lists@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> 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 -- users mailing list users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe or change subscription options: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/users Fedora Code of Conduct: http://fedoraproject.org/code-of-conduct Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines Have a question? Ask away: http://ask.fedoraproject.org
