David Busby wrote: > I'm in the boat with the folks who say read the manual and such.
Then you're on the wrong boat. It appalls me the level of software quality that some people will not only put up with, but defend. I say this as a software engineer, myself. If someone came to me and pointed out how a program that I designed or implemented did not behave reasonably, I would never have the attitude you show. Let me ask, just what motivates you to defend poor design decisions? What advantage do you think this attitude brings to the world? And just pray tell, what advantage do you think there is in the installer clearing all partitions on the computer, rather than just the ones on disk drives involved in the OS install? There isn't even an option in the Kickstart Configurator to do what one would want to do 99% of the time, which is to clear partitions only on the disk drives involved in the OS install. And for the record, the manual is no clearer about the issue than is the gui interface of which I complain. > That said I would like to let you know that in the computer world 1=1 > and 0=0 and 1!=0. That would be true in just about any world, and is a complete nonsequitor. > What that means is a phrase like "remove all partitions" means exactly > that, while "remove all partions on disk Alpha" would only affect the > Alpha disk. Well, then, while it's at it, why doesn't it go and remove the paritions on all the drives on the network too? After all, all is all. Also, there is no option in the Kickstart Configurator to limit the partition clearing to only the disk drives you specify, while there *are* options for limiting which disk drives will have filesystems placed on them. A *reasonable* installer would limit the partition clearing to the same disk drives that partition placement is limitted to. This really isn't rocket science -- it's just common sense. (And as a matter of fact, I do work on rocket science, so I know a thing or two about robust software.) Let me ask you a question: In your entire life have you *ever* seen an OS installer (other than Red Hat's) that would delete partitions on all disk drives, including ones uninvolved in the OS installation? Well, I haven't. Not in 26 years of being pretty heavily involved in installing OS'es. So, yes I agree that there is a well-understood convention for how OS installation typically works, and no it doesn't typically work as you say it does. > You will hear many many times to RTFM or RTFB and you must do that. TaFFaaRD. > In the GNU/Linux world applications assume you know what you are > doing, in Windows applications assume you don't (thus the prompts). I really don't need a lecture on the difference between Linux and Windows. I've been happily using Unix for 25 years. > To help get you started on backups check out: > man tar Tape Archiver > man gzip Compressor > man rsync Remote Sync (awesome!) > http://www.amanda.org/ (Advanced Maryland Automatic Network Disk Archiver) > man cron (Schedule something to happen) Puleaze. I'm the person who set up and has babysit Amanda here for the last 5 years. I can issue complex tar command in my sleep. The fact that an organization can and should have backups is no excuse for software to treat data recklessly. Also, when you figure out how to easily and thoroughly backup many terrabytes of data within a rather limitted budget even with these tools please do tell me. |>oug -- redhat-list mailing list unsubscribe mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] https://listman.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/redhat-list
