Re: [Base] Fedora Base Design Working Group (2014-02-21) meeting minutes and logs

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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

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