On Fri, 2014-02-21 at 17:08 +0100, Phil Knirsch wrote: > Installer is still a hot topic, but thats nothing we could resolve > during our meeting and which might have to be brought up with FESCO again. So, as cmurf has been trying to point out on desktop@ , we (QA) have some concerns in this area too, and I know the installer team is open to the idea of at least simplifying the non-custom partitioning path to some extent. This is an extremely complex topic area, though, and it may be tricky to get the right things done if multiple teams are considering it in different contexts in different meetings. It would probably be a Very Good Idea to get everyone with an interest - at least anaconda team, the product WGs (except possibly Cloud, depending on whether they intend to use anaconda in their deliverables at all), base WG, and fesco - together in some way to talk about it. devconf would've been great but it already happened. Flock would be great but it's too late. Should we try to set up some kind of special meeting / list / etherpad / wikipage / *something* where we can all talk it over? To give a bit of background and detail in QA's interest: First, to ensure everyone actually knows what we're talking about, we tend to talk about two major partitioning 'paths' in anaconda: 'guided' and 'custom'. 'custom' may also be referred to as 'manual'. In both newUI and oldUI, 'guided' is simply what you get if you don't pick custom partitioning, when you are given the opportunity to do so. In oldUI, you had the screen which gave you about five choices of different partitioning 'approaches' (reformat the entire disk(s), reformat only the Linux partitions, resize existing partitions to create free space, just install into free space, maybe one or two others I forgot). In newUI there's a different workflow after you pick target disks on the Installation Destination spoke which, broadly, accomplishes the same options in a rather different way. Broadly, QA is interested in doing something similar to what desktop wants to do, for slightly different reasons. Historically, QA and anaconda more or less agreed on an approach whereby the 'guided' partitioning path would be expected to work extremely reliably: QA would undertake to test every (well, nearly every) route through that path regularly and proactively, and anaconda would undertake to fix the bugs. Custom partitioning was much more of a 'bonus' thing: if it worked, great. QA would test it as much as we had time for, and anaconda would fix as many bugs as they could after fixing higher priority stuff. I went back and looked at the history, and in the earlier days of Fedora, the guided path was consciously designed to be very 'choice free'. Later in the 'oldUI' days, the path to more complexity in the 'guided' path was opened up by a sort of hack. Some people did not want LVM (after it was made default waaaaay back in FC3 or something), and eventually this demand became so persistent that it was decided to stick a checkbox in the 'guided' partitioning path which let you get a plain ext(3/4) layout instead of an LVM layout. This was always a kind of ugly compromise, it wasn't intended to be a design decision. It was manageable, because a plain ext3/4 layout is a fairly simple thing that isn't likely to break much. This context was kind of lost in the newUI re-design, and the 'I don't want LVM' checkbox kind of got a promotion. It's not a very good UI, and the point of the newUI stuff was to make the UI better, so instead of this 'special' checkbox, newUI used a dropdown menu - and because we were all ra-ra for btrfs at the time and expecting it to be the default Real Soon Now, and we thought we should make it easy for people to test the thing that was soon going to be the default, it got btrfs added. So in F18 we had a dropdown with "LVM", "ext4" and "btrfs" choices (IIRC). With the best of intentions, we'd gone from a reluctant exception to the 'no choice' design to a dropdown which included two very different complex choices: LVM and btrfs. So now the installer path which was originally supposed to be minimal-choice, very robust and testable and fixable, had become rather a lot more complex. By F20 we'd really kind of lost track of the initial intent, so no-one (including QA) really worried much about adding LVM thinp to the drop-down - it's a drop-down! it's for choices! - and now, we've got *four* major choices on the path that was originally supposed to be very dependable and choice-free and testable and maintainable, and of course we wound up shipping one of them entirely broken out of the box. QA and anaconda have already discussed this and, I think, we came to a tentative agreement that we could look at at least reducing the level of choice in 'non-custom' partitioning, and remembering the original intent we had (which I think both QA and anaconda teams quite like). It may be difficult to entirely drop the selection, but it seems at least reasonable to go back to only having one 'plain partition' choice and one 'LVM' choice (whether it's 'regular' LVM or thinp LVM), and relegating other choices to the 'custom' path. QA's angle on this is that it's really extremely difficult to develop a plausible set of storage release criteria and validation tests with the current situation. If we map out all the possible paths through the 'non-custom' path it still comes out to something like 80, given the current level of choice, and it's pretty impractical to test 80 different routes at every TC/RC build. Or even at every milestone. So if we don't change the design, QA is effectively forced to test only a reduced subset of the 'non-custom' path choices, whether we *plan* to do that or we pretend we're going to test them all but, inevitably, don't. Yet the installer design doesn't really communicate in any way that some paths through 'non-custom' install are more tested/reliable than others. Anyhow, that's kind of where we left off back in December or January, and we probably really ought to get around to looking at this again - and, as I said, incorporating the perspectives of the different Product WGs and the question of variant anacondas (whether any of the Products actually wants one, and if so, whether that's actually viable) pretty soon. -- Adam Williamson Fedora QA Community Monkey IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | XMPP: adamw AT happyassassin . net http://www.happyassassin.net -- devel mailing list devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel Fedora Code of Conduct: http://fedoraproject.org/code-of-conduct
