On 22 March 2014 17:06, Patrick O'Callaghan <pocallaghan@xxxxxxxxx> 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. -- Liam Proven * Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile Email: lproven@xxxxxxxxx * GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven MSN: lproven@xxxxxxxxxxx * Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 * Cell: +44 7939-087884 -- 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
