On 4/6/2021 11:46 PM, Lennart Sorensen wrote:
On Tue, Apr 06, 2021 at 05:35:19PM -0400, Cmdte Alpha Tigre Z wrote:
Pardon my ignorance.
I could not resist to answer to this proposal.
I read this page: https://www.flamingspork.com/projects/libeatmydata/
It looks like it is not good idea to use it for critical information.
However, your results show that it would be relevant to include
such package into the first ISO, if it is not so big, of course.
It sounds like a good idea to speed up the instalation process
for some cases.
But, I would not enable it by default. If the package really
behaves as its name suggests,
I would not risk every user
of Debian to have a faulty installation. What would happen
if someone wants to install Debian an suddenly, the installer
eats some data it shouldn't have.
Even if it does not access wrong places, in the worst case
you could have installed an ill OS and don't notice
it will someday fail, and not gracefully.
My humble opinion is that it should be available to use,
but not enabled by default.
The only time eatmydata does any harm is if the system looses power or
resets during the install since the data isn't constantly flushed to disk
to maintain a consistent state. During an install, there is nothing of
value on the system yet, so doing everything as quickly as possible and
then when everything is done, then you issue a sync command to ensure
everything is flushed to disk saves a ton of time with no risk at all
(in fact since the install takes less time, the changes of a power
interruption happening during the install is lowered).
This move should be documented somewhere and maybe emit a warning to
that effect before starting the installer:
"Incase of failure during the installation, it is recommended to restart
from scratch."
Could d-i verify that the installation was successfull and tell it to
the user?
--
John Doe
