Re: F21 partitioning circus
On 02/26/2015 07:26 AM, Chris Murphy wrote: On Wed, Feb 25, 2015 at 10:24 PM, Ralf Corsepius rc040...@freenet.de wrote: On 02/25/2015 09:30 PM, Chris Murphy wrote: If people aren't actually going to test what we have, and file bug report, If you want to see this thing fixed, tested and see bug reports, then publish updates on a regular basis. Monthly network installer iso images, for instance. Rawhide nightlies have boot.iso (which is network installer ISO). I am not talking about rawhide (which I consider to be a dumping ground for packages), I am talking about released distros and in-release-preps distros. I.e. updated images for f20. f21, f22. And yes, an aspect, we haven't yet discussed is the look'n'feel of the GUI - Sure, this is personal taste, I do not consider the anaconda GUI changes as improvements. I have criticized the UI/UX of the installer. I have almost totally given up on that at this point because there's just no will power on the part of Anaconda to fix it, absent extremely clear proven concepts to fix the deficiencies rather than just throw spaghetti at a wall to find out how many less users the UI/UX annoys. So if you have some mock ups and at least clear rationalization of how this improves UI/UX, file an RFE. But it's better if you can at least ping the Fedora UI expert: http://blog.linuxgrrl.com/ Fedora UI expert? Sorry, but I am ROTFL. I don't know on which basis this person has gained the expertise from, but my personal impression on this GUI work definitely is negative. It's fashion-design not usability/functionality-oriented design. let alone expert features that only sometimes work. Once again: I feel you are trying to have smart features - This is not what experts want - Tough. They want full control, Tough. I don't buy this. The working principle should pretty simple. OK well I'll put you in the troublemaker category too because you keep saying you see problems but you've given no examples and you've supplied no bug reports. OK, provided what you say, I'll put you into the non-cooperational, learning-resistant RH-puppet category. EOT -- users mailing list users@lists.fedoraproject.org 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
Re: F21 partitioning circus
Can we get a list admin to kill this thread? Two people calling each other names (and more) back and forth is really not that helpful. -- Chris Adams li...@cmadams.net -- users mailing list users@lists.fedoraproject.org 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
Re: F21 partitioning circus
On Thu, Feb 26, 2015 at 7:04 AM, Ralf Corsepius rc040...@freenet.de wrote: On 02/26/2015 07:26 AM, Chris Murphy wrote: On Wed, Feb 25, 2015 at 10:24 PM, Ralf Corsepius rc040...@freenet.de wrote: On 02/25/2015 09:30 PM, Chris Murphy wrote: If people aren't actually going to test what we have, and file bug report, If you want to see this thing fixed, tested and see bug reports, then publish updates on a regular basis. Monthly network installer iso images, for instance. Rawhide nightlies have boot.iso (which is network installer ISO). I am not talking about rawhide (which I consider to be a dumping ground for packages), I am talking about released distros and in-release-preps distros. I.e. updated images for f20. f21, f22. You want more releases to complain about without offering specifics or bug reports. This isn't trustworthy reasoning, so near as I can tell you're just a nut. And yes, an aspect, we haven't yet discussed is the look'n'feel of the GUI - Sure, this is personal taste, I do not consider the anaconda GUI changes as improvements. I have criticized the UI/UX of the installer. I have almost totally given up on that at this point because there's just no will power on the part of Anaconda to fix it, absent extremely clear proven concepts to fix the deficiencies rather than just throw spaghetti at a wall to find out how many less users the UI/UX annoys. So if you have some mock ups and at least clear rationalization of how this improves UI/UX, file an RFE. But it's better if you can at least ping the Fedora UI expert: http://blog.linuxgrrl.com/ Fedora UI expert? Sorry, but I am ROTFL. I don't know on which basis this person has gained the expertise from, but my personal impression on this GUI work definitely is negative. It's fashion-design not usability/functionality-oriented design. You're quite the oaf. I'll use small words, so hopefully you'll understand. The preferred practice when flinging shit, is to be specific where it lands, rather than wholly smearing people. Otherwise, if you get to do this to others, they get to do it to you, and then where does it end? Pro tip: Don't pull down your pants and take a dump on people in public, like you just did. Being an oaf doesn't absolve you of this minimum etiquette. let alone expert features that only sometimes work. Once again: I feel you are trying to have smart features - This is not what experts want - Tough. They want full control, Tough. I don't buy this. The working principle should pretty simple. OK well I'll put you in the troublemaker category too because you keep saying you see problems but you've given no examples and you've supplied no bug reports. OK, provided what you say, I'll put you into the non-cooperational, learning-resistant RH-puppet category. EOT Cute. Throwing toys out of the pram now. http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2013/11/conspiracy_theory_psychology_people_who_claim_to_know_the_truth_about_jfk.html According to that I shouldn't call you paranoid and delusional. But seeing as this is beyond my area of interest or expertise I'll leave your trust issues in your own hands. Or maybe it's in the water you're drinking? -- Chris Murphy -- users mailing list users@lists.fedoraproject.org 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
Re: F21 partitioning circus
On Thu, 26 Feb 2015 11:49:34 -0600 Chris Adams li...@cmadams.net wrote: Can we get a list admin to kill this thread? Two people calling each other names (and more) back and forth is really not that helpful. Yeah. I would have done it sooner but I have been busy and apparently so have all the other list admins. Additionally, those of you making the personal attacks: Please reconsider your approach. Consider this thread closed. kevin pgpaTYb4PX8AE.pgp Description: OpenPGP digital signature -- users mailing list users@lists.fedoraproject.org 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
Re: F21 partitioning circus
On 02/24/2015 05:56 PM, Chris Murphy wrote: On Tue, Feb 24, 2015 at 8:51 AM, Ralf Corsepius rc040...@freenet.de wrote: Similar restriction apply elsewhere. E.g. I have an older BIOS system which for (at least to me) unknown reasons refuses to boot from chained/cascaded grub partitions beyond some disk-limits. Quite old, It's a 2008 netbook, I am facing this issue with. It has Windows, Fedora 20, Fedora 21, Ubuntu and SuSE installed in parallel on ca. 12-15 partitions. In more complex multiboot configurations (e.g. several different linux distros, several releases of the same distro, several different configurations of the same distro), other aspects come into play, which more or less are personal preference, such as keeping an OSs' partitions consecutively together, whether to share or not to share boot or swap partitions etc. Right and this cannot possibly be supported by Fedora absent an agreed upon boot specification. Why would you want to try supporting this? An Expert mode with options to partition manually, an option to manually specify the install location of a boot loader/partition and to specify mount points would suffice this need. But the converse applies: A tool which doesn't suffice my needs, will not be my choice and will loose me as a customer Yes, but it's a 60+ email thread and the people complaining about Anaconda Manual Partitioning, especially the custom isn't custom claim haven't produced any examples or bugs of what they want to do that the installer won't allow. This is no surprise to me. Most people (comprising me) don't do installs on a regular basis. All I can say, last time I performed a fresh install on a machine with pre-configured Windows, back in Dec, I tried to use automated partitioning but it failed (Sorry, I did not keep book about it). I found myself resorting to manually resizing/moving partitions using Windows and gparted from rescuecd, and later pre-partitioned it for Fedora, again using rescuecd. Afterwards, installation went real problems. A detail I recall on another machine was the Live-DVD-stuff having failing miserably, because it ran out of memory and bombed out due to Gnome's requirement on 3d. I ended up using the Xfce-DVD and preconfiguring a swap partition. Ralf -- users mailing list users@lists.fedoraproject.org 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
Re: F21 partitioning circus
On Wed, Feb 25, 2015 at 1:44 AM, Heinz Diehl htd...@fritha.org wrote: On 24.02.2015, jd1008 wrote: Myself, I always know how to tell anaconda I will manually partition the drive, without resorting to external tools. But I cannot assume that ALL other people have the know-how to manually partition their drives. A simple solution would be to do whatever is necessary for the vast majority in anaconda, but to have one single button which says: full control, do what you want, this can eat your dog. One single button with 4000 lines of code behind it. You assume that providing full control in a GUI just happens magically as if that work is already done and the Anaconda folks are willfully disabling things. That's not how it works. In the GUI world, there is a void. Where there is substance, there is a lot of code. So when you say full control to do what you want, you're talking about a lot of substance and therefore a lots and lots of code. And setting that aside, it's really not OK to put hurt me buttons in GUI programs. The disclosure really doesn't get you out of blowing up someone's setup. I mean, presumably you want it to work, otherwise why are you asking for it? So now it has to be tested, and bugs found, and it all has to be maintained or it will break. Bug reports based on the use of this button automatically would be labeled WONTFIX. Period. Right well, we've seen this happen already with system-config-lvm being deprecated, and a bunch (all?) LVM support in Gnome Disks being yanked. No one wanted to do the work to maintain this stuff. So away it goes. So you're saying that someone should build it, and then not maintain it, and once it breaks the bugs are set to WONTFIX meaning overtime the entire interface you're talking about building is completely untrustworthy. No. When you sign up for building roads, you're signing up for maintaining them. If you don't have the budget or interest to make them safe and usable for some decent period of time, don't build in them in the first place. It's a waste of resources. Following this thread, I guess this won't happen.. I'm not associated with the installer team. I have no idea what their plans are. I have very little idea of what sorts of things they'd accept. Therefore I do not speak for them at all. But I can pretty much guarantee you they are not going to maintain someone else's idea, nor would they accept an additional interface without a maintenance plan. And that assumes you've presented a viable use case scenario. Based on what I'm hearing, I'd recommend no go. Instead, please put these resources into accessibility. I'd rather make life easier for the vision impaired before spending more resources coddling so called power users who won't/can't use CLI tools or kickstart and want to produce questionable layouts. At least you have some tools to do what you want. Let's get real. -- Chris Murphy -- users mailing list users@lists.fedoraproject.org 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
Re: F21 partitioning circus
On 25.02.2015, Chris Murphy wrote: One single button with 4000 lines of code behind it. You assume that providing full control in a GUI just happens magically as if that work is already done and the Anaconda folks are willfully disabling things. Not at all. An example could be something like this: a button which opens a shell with fdisk or gparted or similar, wich then jumps back to anaconda when partitioning is done, which then rereads the disk layout and let me enter the mountpoints would suffice. I'm sure that's fewer lines of code than the custom function which has been in F19. -- users mailing list users@lists.fedoraproject.org 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
Re: F21 partitioning circus
On 02/25/2015 12:14 PM, Chris Murphy wrote: One single button with 4000 lines of code behind it. You assume that providing full control in a GUI just happens magically as if that work is already done and the Anaconda folks are willfully disabling things. I doubt that. What we want is a way to turn off most of what the devs would consider sanity checks, and get back to the old Unix idea of not stopping you from doing something crazy if it also stops me from doing something clever. And really, what's the difference between refusing to patch bugs if you're using Expert Mode and refusing to examine kernel bugs if the kernel's tainted, at least from the end-user's POV? -- users mailing list users@lists.fedoraproject.org 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
Re: F21 partitioning circus
On 02/25/2015 12:46 PM, Heinz Diehl wrote: An example could be something like this: a button which opens a shell with fdisk or gparted or similar, I like that. If you don't know enough Linux to use those tools (or how to read and understand whatever help they give) you probably don't know enough about the potential consequences of what you want to do. That would be an excellent pons asinorum that would weed out most of the users who have overestimated their own knowledge and skills. I presume that the GUI already has sanity checks that make sure that you don't put directories that must be on the root filesystem for booting onto separate partitions, and those would still apply. -- users mailing list users@lists.fedoraproject.org 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
Re: F21 partitioning circus
On Wed, Feb 25, 2015 at 6:41 AM, Ralf Corsepius rc040...@freenet.de wrote: On 02/24/2015 05:56 PM, Chris Murphy wrote: On Tue, Feb 24, 2015 at 8:51 AM, Ralf Corsepius rc040...@freenet.de wrote: Similar restriction apply elsewhere. E.g. I have an older BIOS system which for (at least to me) unknown reasons refuses to boot from chained/cascaded grub partitions beyond some disk-limits. Quite old, It's a 2008 netbook, I am facing this issue with. It has Windows, Fedora 20, Fedora 21, Ubuntu and SuSE installed in parallel on ca. 12-15 partitions. I mean the BIOS, not computer. I have a ~2002 computer with ~2004 BIOS firmware (updated) that boots from 2+TB drives using GPT where BIOSBoot is not at the start but quite beyond 1TB and it works. In other configurations I've had it where there's no partition map at all, and I put the bootloader in the 64KB pad on Btrfs. That works. Anyway, I don't know why your firmware is uncooperative but it ought not be up to the firmware once GRUB is loaded. In more complex multiboot configurations (e.g. several different linux distros, several releases of the same distro, several different configurations of the same distro), other aspects come into play, which more or less are personal preference, such as keeping an OSs' partitions consecutively together, whether to share or not to share boot or swap partitions etc. Right and this cannot possibly be supported by Fedora absent an agreed upon boot specification. Why would you want to try supporting this? I definitely don't. I'd rather a finger in my eyeball. An Expert mode with options to partition manually, an option to manually specify the install location of a boot loader/partition and to specify mount points would suffice this need. In Fedora, supported basically means we block on it if it doesn't work. The installer is sacrosanct, everything offered in it should work or we should block: the reality is that QA is more tolerant of such broken things than I am, mainly because they already put in massive amounts of time on blockers that are installer related, and if they blocked on every broken thing in the installer we'd never ship. And that's the reason why I take the position I have which is: it cannot be important enough to even be included in the first place, if we don't have the resources to test every single option, every single outcome, and block if they don't work as intended. Expert modes in GUIs are dog crap. They're a cesspool for bugs to creep in and blow up in hapless users' faces and I think that's inherently wrong. It's worse to have a bug in a GUI that breaks someone's system than it is to strip out all the expert stuff and not even offer it in the GUI to begin with. Expert mode is kickstart and the CLI tools that do exactly what you want. But the converse applies: A tool which doesn't suffice my needs, will not be my choice and will loose me as a customer Yes, but it's a 60+ email thread and the people complaining about Anaconda Manual Partitioning, especially the custom isn't custom claim haven't produced any examples or bugs of what they want to do that the installer won't allow. This is no surprise to me. Most people (comprising me) don't do installs on a regular basis. All I can say, last time I performed a fresh install on a machine with pre-configured Windows, back in Dec, I tried to use automated partitioning but it failed (Sorry, I did not keep book about it). I found myself resorting to manually resizing/moving partitions using Windows and gparted from rescuecd, and later pre-partitioned it for Fedora, again using rescuecd. Afterwards, installation went real problems. A detail I recall on another machine was the Live-DVD-stuff having failing miserably, because it ran out of memory and bombed out due to Gnome's requirement on 3d. I ended up using the Xfce-DVD and preconfiguring a swap partition. What you're talking about is the installer's expert mode! That's as expert as it gets, and you're saying that it's broken in your case, so then you're complaining about how it ought to work. There is no free lunch here. Where are the bug reports? If people aren't actually going to test what we have, and file bug report, so it has a chance of getting fixed, it just proves my point that these things should be removed. We need less, not more stuff that people won't test. Get rid of the boogers that we can't seem to flick off. Stability and trustworthiness are immensely more valuable in a GUI installer than expert features; let alone expert features that only sometimes work. -- Chris Murphy -- users mailing list users@lists.fedoraproject.org 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
Re: F21 partitioning circus
On Wed, 2015-02-25 at 12:56 -0800, Joe Zeff wrote: On 02/25/2015 12:46 PM, Heinz Diehl wrote: An example could be something like this: a button which opens a shell with fdisk or gparted or similar, I like that. If you don't know enough Linux to use those tools (or how to read and understand whatever help they give) you probably don't know enough about the potential consequences of what you want to do. That would be an excellent pons asinorum that would weed out most of the users who have overestimated their own knowledge and skills. I presume that the GUI already has sanity checks that make sure that you don't put directories that must be on the root filesystem for booting onto separate partitions, and those would still apply. I'm not clear how this is better than just running fdisk off the live image before running the installer, though. Woogie -- users mailing list users@lists.fedoraproject.org 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
Re: F21 partitioning circus
On 02/25/2015 01:14 PM, Mike Wohlgemuth wrote: I'm not clear how this is better than just running fdisk off the live image before running the installer, though. Well, what about those people who don't install from a live image? When I've had to do a clean install of Fedora, I've always used the complete install version so that I could select what I wanted installed instead of having to play around with a live version, and/or get what I wanted (and get rid of what I didn't want) later. I'm only guessing, but it seems reasonable to me that most of us who want more control probably do the same thing. -- users mailing list users@lists.fedoraproject.org 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
Re: F21 partitioning circus
On Wed, 25 Feb 2015 13:23:32 -0800 Joe Zeff wrote: I've had to do a clean install of Fedora, I've always used the complete install version Since 21 there is no complete version. About the only way to not use live media is to use netinstall. -- users mailing list users@lists.fedoraproject.org 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
Re: F21 partitioning circus
On 02/25/2015 01:44 PM, Tom Horsley wrote: Since 21 there is no complete version. About the only way to not use live media is to use netinstall. So? Next time I do a clean install, that's what I'll use. -- users mailing list users@lists.fedoraproject.org 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
Re: F21 partitioning circus
On Wed, Feb 25, 2015 at 1:45 PM, Joe Zeff j...@zeff.us wrote: On 02/25/2015 12:14 PM, Chris Murphy wrote: One single button with 4000 lines of code behind it. You assume that providing full control in a GUI just happens magically as if that work is already done and the Anaconda folks are willfully disabling things. I doubt that. OK well you don't know. And as I've at least had the courtesy to look at the code, even though I don't read python, I know that seemingly innocuously simple things aren't actually simple. It's not merely about sanity checks. If the underlying program doesn't like what you've done and exits with something other than 0, presumably you want to know why and that error handling has to be coded, it doesn't just pass through. If it did just pass through, why aren't you using kickstart or CLI tools in the first place? What we want is a way to turn off most of what the devs would consider sanity checks, and get back to the old Unix idea of not stopping you from doing something crazy if it also stops me from doing something clever. You haven't even stated what clever thing you want to do that the installer, as it exists now, won't let you do. I suspect you don't want what you think is clever actually eviscerated as a bad idea. And really, what's the difference between refusing to patch bugs if you're using Expert Mode and refusing to examine kernel bugs if the kernel's tainted, at least from the end-user's POV? I refuse your premise. The feature requesters have no champion offering to even create this hypothetical Expert Mode, therefore no one is refusing to patch bugs for something that doesn't even exist. And refusing to examine bugs on tainted kernels is completely legitimate because it requires deep understanding and time to know exactly how far a particular out of tree patch or driver is affecting the kernel, in order to know whether it's related to a kernel bug. This is known as defining boundaries of responsibility. It's not like the kernel devs are being arbitrary with their boundaries, they're in fact being really clear about it. -- Chris Murphy -- users mailing list users@lists.fedoraproject.org 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
Re: F21 partitioning circus
On Wed, Feb 25, 2015 at 1:46 PM, Heinz Diehl htd...@fritha.org wrote: An example could be something like this: a button which opens a shell with fdisk or gparted or similar, wich then jumps back to anaconda when partitioning is done, which then rereads the disk layout and let me enter the mountpoints would suffice. Why do you need a button in the installer? Why is ctrl-alt-f2 to get to a shell insufficient? And then once you're done with CLI tools doing whatever you need to do, you return to the installer with ctrl-alt-f1 or f6 (live vs netinstall/dvd) and then click the Reload storage configuration from disk button (the one that looks like a web browser reload icon, circle arrow, to the right of the + and - mountpoint buttons). Why is this insufficient? I'm sure that's fewer lines of code than the custom function which has been in F19. I don't know what custom function you're referring to that's in F19, but not F18 or F20. -- Chris Murphy -- users mailing list users@lists.fedoraproject.org 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
Re: F21 partitioning circus
On 02/25/2015 01:57 PM, Chris Murphy wrote: I refuse your premise. The feature requesters have no champion offering to even create this hypothetical Expert Mode, therefore no one is refusing to patch bugs for something that doesn't even exist. Just to be clear, do you mean I refuse to accept your premise or I refute your premise? If the former, there's no need to continue this thread because you're completely unwilling to accept the possibility that you might be wrong; if the latter, you need to learn that simply stating that I'm wrong doesn't refute me. As far as what corner cases I'm thinking about, when I first started moving from Windows to Linux I had a very odd partitioning layout for Windows, because it allowed me to isolate various projects from each other and limit the disk space they used. At that time, it was easy to accommodate this when I installed Linux, but I'm very uncertain if I could get it to do what I want today. For me, this is purely academic as that disk's been archived and I no longer need that weird layout, but it's left me very well aware that One Size Doesn't Fit All and we shouldn't pretend that it does. -- users mailing list users@lists.fedoraproject.org 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
Re: F21 partitioning circus
On Wed, Feb 25, 2015 at 3:08 PM, Joe Zeff j...@zeff.us wrote: On 02/25/2015 01:57 PM, Chris Murphy wrote: I refuse your premise. The feature requesters have no champion offering to even create this hypothetical Expert Mode, therefore no one is refusing to patch bugs for something that doesn't even exist. Just to be clear, do you mean I refuse to accept your premise or I refute your premise? The former. If the former, there's no need to continue this thread because you're completely unwilling to accept the possibility that you might be wrong; No in fact I love being wrong, it means I get to learn something new and I value that more than being right. But shadenfreude is delicious, so I also like causing dissonance in others when I think they're wrong. In this case, your premise is refused because it hinges on something that is false: refusing to patch bugs if you're using Expert Mode. What bugs? What refusal? What Expert Mode? As far as what corner cases I'm thinking about, when I first started moving from Windows to Linux I had a very odd partitioning layout for Windows, because it allowed me to isolate various projects from each other and limit the disk space they used. At that time, it was easy to accommodate this when I installed Linux, but I'm very uncertain if I could get it to do what I want today. So 75+ emails on a thread about how the installer can't do what you want, and it's actually based on uncertainty? You need more Pai Mei in your life. I have obviously been way, way too diplomatic and patient. For me, this is purely academic as that disk's been archived and I no longer need that weird layout, but it's left me very well aware that One Size Doesn't Fit All and we shouldn't pretend that it does. From the very start I said the installer UI should be more use case oriented to help users get optimized layouts, NOT ONE SIZE FITS ALL, while also not requiring they be experts in leveraging Linux's advanced storage technologies. I'm arguing against both one size fits all, and let's give users razor blades and tell them to go play on the freeway and then blame them for their own mistakes, and so they can go suck on eggs. -- Chris Murphy -- users mailing list users@lists.fedoraproject.org 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
Re: F21 partitioning circus
On 02/25/2015 02:05 PM, Chris Murphy wrote: Why do you need a button in the installer? Why is ctrl-alt-f2 to get to a shell insufficient? An excellent point. If the needed CLI tools are provided by default, that's all that's really needed, isn't it? (Having this mentioned either in the installer's instructions or in the on-line Documentation would be a Good Idea as well.) -- users mailing list users@lists.fedoraproject.org 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
Re: F21 partitioning circus
On Wed, Feb 25, 2015 at 3:22 PM, Joe Zeff j...@zeff.us wrote: An excellent point. If the needed CLI tools are provided by default, that's all that's really needed, isn't it? (Having this mentioned either in the installer's instructions or in the on-line Documentation would be a Good Idea as well.) They are provided by default, they're hard dependencies by Anaconda. It's not always the case gdisk is available, and maybe not fdisk (although I've never seen it missing) because anaconda uses parted to manipulate both MBR and GPT partitions. http://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/Fedora/21/html/Installation_Guide/sect-installation-gui-manual-partitioning.html Starting with To discard all changes... -- Chris Murphy -- users mailing list users@lists.fedoraproject.org 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
Re: F21 partitioning circus
On Wed, Feb 25, 2015 at 3:36 PM, Joe Zeff j...@zeff.us wrote: On 02/25/2015 02:22 PM, Chris Murphy wrote: So 75+ emails on a thread about how the installer can't do what you want, and it's actually based on uncertainty? You need more Pai Mei in your life. I have obviously been way, way too diplomatic and patient. One of the many things I like about Linux is the flexibility. You want to take it away. I've said nor implied no such thing. I've very specifically applied feature creep criticism to the GUI installer, and as yet I haven't even said what I would take away from the current GUI installer, only that I wouldn't add any more functionality to it until what we have now is better stabilized. Just because I don't currently need to create weird partitioning schemes doesn't mean that I don't value it. Kickstart. CLI tools. Not GUI installer. Weird does not belong, AT ALL, in the GUI installer. Weird is untrustworthy. Weird is unintuitive. Weird is capricious. They are incompatible with positive, clean, quick UX. The GUI installer is unique, users don't use it often, they shouldn't even have to depend on any documentation if it does its job correctly. -- Chris Murphy -- users mailing list users@lists.fedoraproject.org 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
Re: F21 partitioning circus
On 02/25/2015 03:15 PM, Chris Murphy wrote: On Wed, Feb 25, 2015 at 4:04 PM, Joe Zeff j...@zeff.us wrote: On 02/25/2015 02:55 PM, Chris Murphy wrote: THAT'S THE F'N DEFINITION OF TROLLING. FACTLESS! No, trolling is making posts designed to get other people angry and cause dissention, which you've already admitted to doing. No more food for you, troll. No, my posts are designed to hold people accountable for things they say, and insist they provide facts, not mere opinions. If that demand just so happens to cause the conjecturing factless troublemaker some consternation, I might smile, but that's completely incidental not the goal. Crickets chirping... -- users mailing list users@lists.fedoraproject.org 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
Re: F21 partitioning circus
On Wed, Feb 25, 2015 at 4:44 PM, Joe Zeff j...@zeff.us wrote: On 02/25/2015 03:27 PM, Chris Murphy wrote: But no, you were just being a discourteous person. Actually, until you made it clear that one of your main reasons for posting was to create dissension, You keep making these grandiose, broad sweeping, and false assertions: You want to take [Linux flexibility] away. I see: you're simply a troll. you're completely unwilling to accept the possibility that you might be wrong And now this latest distortion of I also like causing dissonance in others when I think they're wrong which is hardly the main reason for my posts, let alone clearly so, let alone even about dissension. And that's just today. Please stop. Last, I'd like to point out that I've not been asking for things that I personally need, I've been supporting my position on a matter of principle: specifically the principle that the person doing the installation should be the final judge of how they want things set up, not the developers. OK well you're wrong on the matter of principle because wanting is not good enough. There is no entitlement without the work. Users are routinely terrible at articulating what they want, so even building what they say they want is folly. They're only saying they wan a thing because they don't know what else to ask for or how to ask it. I reject the principle the user is always right (or the developer, or me for that matter). And self evidently you're wrong on the matter of turning your principle into practice. The very fact your principle can't consistently be realized except through developer coercion to build things against their better judgement and always and only what the user wants is how demonstrably flawed it is. We need more work narrowing the difference between developer and user, so that users can more easily be developers, or even get so far as to blur the line entirely. But if anything, we're seeing computing get farther and farther away from this, more and more specialized as users and developers go separate ways. You cannot fix that problem by pontificating some abstract principle subscribing to the user want being an inherent good. It's already difficult to fix this problem because the current paradigm means growing numbers of developers and users, so current behaviors are self-rewarding (or at worst, they seem safe). I like this Steve Job quote: But in the end, for something this complicated, it's really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them. -- Chris Murphy -- users mailing list users@lists.fedoraproject.org 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
Re: F21 partitioning circus
On 02/25/2015 02:22 PM, Chris Murphy wrote: So 75+ emails on a thread about how the installer can't do what you want, and it's actually based on uncertainty? You need more Pai Mei in your life. I have obviously been way, way too diplomatic and patient. One of the many things I like about Linux is the flexibility. You want to take it away. Just because I don't currently need to create weird partitioning schemes doesn't mean that I don't value it. -- users mailing list users@lists.fedoraproject.org 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
Re: F21 partitioning circus
On Wed, Feb 25, 2015 at 3:37 PM, Joe Zeff j...@zeff.us wrote: On 02/25/2015 02:22 PM, Chris Murphy wrote: No in fact I love being wrong, it means I get to learn something new and I value that more than being right. But shadenfreude is delicious, so I also like causing dissonance in others when I think they're wrong. I see: you're simply a troll. Get back under your bridge before I unleash my billy goat. Uh huh, well if I'm the troll, why is it I actually answer your questions, while for three days you've dodged mine to provide examples of what you can't do that you want to do? And where are your bug reports of how things behave contrary to your expectations? And now it all comes down to, you haven't even tried it, and you're uncertain? THAT'S THE F'N DEFINITION OF TROLLING. FACTLESS! By all means unleash your billy goat, because no doubt it can conduct a debate better than you have. Fine debaters, billy goats. I'll bet your billy goat has bugs filed before you do at this rate. -- Chris Murphy -- users mailing list users@lists.fedoraproject.org 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
Re: F21 partitioning circus
On 02/25/2015 02:55 PM, Chris Murphy wrote: By all means unleash your billy goat, because no doubt it can conduct a debate better than you have. Fine debaters, billy goats. I'll bet your billy goat has bugs filed before you do at this rate. Weird is anything you don't approve of. -- users mailing list users@lists.fedoraproject.org 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
Re: F21 partitioning circus
On 02/25/2015 02:55 PM, Chris Murphy wrote: THAT'S THE F'N DEFINITION OF TROLLING. FACTLESS! No, trolling is making posts designed to get other people angry and cause dissention, which you've already admitted to doing. No more food for you, troll. -- users mailing list users@lists.fedoraproject.org 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
Re: F21 partitioning circus
On 02/25/2015 02:22 PM, Chris Murphy wrote: No in fact I love being wrong, it means I get to learn something new and I value that more than being right. But shadenfreude is delicious, so I also like causing dissonance in others when I think they're wrong. I see: you're simply a troll. Get back under your bridge before I unleash my billy goat. -- users mailing list users@lists.fedoraproject.org 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
Re: F21 partitioning circus
On 02/25/2015 02:30 PM, Chris Murphy wrote: They are provided by default, they're hard dependencies by Anaconda. Thank you; as I've said, it's been years since I've needed to do a clean install of Fedora. As long as they're available, and as long as you can make whatever selections of mount points you need, that's all I would want. And, it makes it harder for newcomers to fsck things up too badly because they're much less likely to know how to get to them or use them. -- users mailing list users@lists.fedoraproject.org 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
Re: F21 partitioning circus
On Wed, Feb 25, 2015 at 4:21 PM, Joe Zeff j...@zeff.us wrote: On 02/25/2015 03:15 PM, Chris Murphy wrote: No, my posts are designed to hold people accountable for things they say, and insist they provide facts, not mere opinions. If that demand just so happens to cause the conjecturing factless troublemaker some consternation, I might smile, but that's completely incidental not the goal. Crickets chirping... Offers one of the guys who didn't even have the courtesy in 100 emails to actually run into the problem he was claiming was a problem that needed someone else do to the work for him to change. You could have had the courtesy to do a VM test install in order to have a common frame of reference with the people asking you over and over again, WTF are you complaining about. But no, you were just being a discourteous person. And I know that now, so please be absolutely positively shocked if I offer you help when you actually need it. -- Chris Murphy -- users mailing list users@lists.fedoraproject.org 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
Re: F21 partitioning circus
On 02/25/2015 03:27 PM, Chris Murphy wrote: But no, you were just being a discourteous person. Actually, until you made it clear that one of your main reasons for posting was to create dissension, I've been very, very careful to remain civil and I intend to continue that way. I'm not saying that you've been rude or used ad homonem arguments because I don't want this to turn into a flame-war, just stating that I've tried my best to remain objective. Last, I'd like to point out that I've not been asking for things that I personally need, I've been supporting my position on a matter of principle: specifically the principle that the person doing the installation should be the final judge of how they want things set up, not the developers. And, since you've very kindly pointed out how that can be done with the current version of anaconda, I have no reason to continue arguing about it. Is there a reason you don't want to drop the subject? -- users mailing list users@lists.fedoraproject.org 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
Re: F21 partitioning circus
On Wed, Feb 25, 2015 at 4:04 PM, Joe Zeff j...@zeff.us wrote: On 02/25/2015 02:55 PM, Chris Murphy wrote: THAT'S THE F'N DEFINITION OF TROLLING. FACTLESS! No, trolling is making posts designed to get other people angry and cause dissention, which you've already admitted to doing. No more food for you, troll. No, my posts are designed to hold people accountable for things they say, and insist they provide facts, not mere opinions. If that demand just so happens to cause the conjecturing factless troublemaker some consternation, I might smile, but that's completely incidental not the goal. -- Chris Murphy -- users mailing list users@lists.fedoraproject.org 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
Re: F21 partitioning circus
On Wed, Feb 25, 2015 at 10:24 PM, Ralf Corsepius rc040...@freenet.de wrote: On 02/25/2015 09:30 PM, Chris Murphy wrote: If people aren't actually going to test what we have, and file bug report, If you want to see this thing fixed, tested and see bug reports, then publish updates on a regular basis. Monthly network installer iso images, for instance. Rawhide nightlies have boot.iso (which is network installer ISO). But that isn't even necessary, any bug report is better than zero report. And I did say to cc me on the bug. If it's a coherent report and easily reproduced, I can incidentally confirm/deny it in a newer build. Stability and trustworthiness are immensely more valuable in a GUI installer than expert features; I once again disagree. This is populism and over-generalization. 80% of all US-American eat burgers twice a week = all we need is to support burgers - Mind you? It is not a populist argument, because I argued against the much larger expert category in favor of the much smaller vision impaired user base. My argument is about giving as many users access as possible without negatively affecting others. And quite frankly as a predominately OS X user, I think I have some qualification when I say the fact I'm comfortable making rather advanced storage stacks at linux CLI indicates anyone who claims to be a power user / expert already has sufficient access. You do not need more access, you simply want more access. But that access siphons resources away from others, and your inevitably more cluttered expert UI makes everyone's life including newbie users more difficult. Be happy with kickstart, honestly, there's nothing really like it on either Windows or OS X. Or hey, another option is to pick up a shovel and help with blivet-gui etc. And yes, an aspect, we haven't yet discussed is the look'n'feel of the GUI - Sure, this is personal taste, I do not consider the anaconda GUI changes as improvements. I have criticized the UI/UX of the installer. I have almost totally given up on that at this point because there's just no will power on the part of Anaconda to fix it, absent extremely clear proven concepts to fix the deficiencies rather than just throw spaghetti at a wall to find out how many less users the UI/UX annoys. So if you have some mock ups and at least clear rationalization of how this improves UI/UX, file an RFE. But it's better if you can at least ping the Fedora UI expert: http://blog.linuxgrrl.com/ which is, BTW, where mockups of the Anaconda new UI appeared almost a year before they were baked into the installer. And it was a few months before Fedora 18 that had the best chance for having the most affect with the least burden for demonstrating how things needed to be different - and that ship has sailed. (And I know because I missed it also.) let alone expert features that only sometimes work. Once again: I feel you are trying to have smart features - This is not what experts want - Tough. They want full control, Tough. No. Get used to disappointment. I'm not sympathetic. should be able to cope with errors, No because a GUI application itself must have error handling internally to keep it from doing basic things like, you know, crashing. so all you'd have to do would be to enable them to to so. No. Unfortunately, I can't see this in recent installers. OK well I'll put you in the troublemaker category too because you keep saying you see problems but you've given no examples and you've supplied no bug reports. -- Chris Murphy -- users mailing list users@lists.fedoraproject.org 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
Re: F21 partitioning circus
On 02/25/2015 09:30 PM, Chris Murphy wrote: If people aren't actually going to test what we have, and file bug report, If you want to see this thing fixed, tested and see bug reports, then publish updates on a regular basis. Monthly network installer iso images, for instance. Stability and trustworthiness are immensely more valuable in a GUI installer than expert features; I once again disagree. This is populism and over-generalization. 80% of all US-American eat burgers twice a week = all we need is to support burgers - Mind you? And yes, an aspect, we haven't yet discussed is the look'n'feel of the GUI - Sure, this is personal taste, I do not consider the anaconda GUI changes as improvements. let alone expert features that only sometimes work. Once again: I feel you are trying to have smart features - This is not what experts want - They want full control, should be able to cope with errors, so all you'd have to do would be to enable them to to so. Unfortunately, I can't see this in recent installers. Ralf -- users mailing list users@lists.fedoraproject.org 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
Re: F21 partitioning circus
On 24.02.2015, jd1008 wrote: Myself, I always know how to tell anaconda I will manually partition the drive, without resorting to external tools. But I cannot assume that ALL other people have the know-how to manually partition their drives. A simple solution would be to do whatever is necessary for the vast majority in anaconda, but to have one single button which says: full control, do what you want, this can eat your dog. Bug reports based on the use of this button automatically would be labeled WONTFIX. Period. Following this thread, I guess this won't happen.. -- users mailing list users@lists.fedoraproject.org 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
Re: F21 partitioning circus
On Tue, Feb 24, 2015 at 11:40 AM, jd1008 jd1...@gmail.com wrote: Provide flexibilty for users who would want schemes other than anaconda's defaults and very limited partitioning options. Flexibility is not inherently a public good in its own right. It comes with costs, typically exponential. Storage stacks are no longer so simple as they once were, and I'm willing to bet dollars to donuts that self-described power users don't know a lot of those fundamentals especially when it comes to multiple device storage. Therefore I'll argue increasingly even the power user isn't actually benefitting from customization. Seems to me anacaonda is heading the way of a closed tool that assumes one hat fits all. Please stop saying this until you can state exactly what hat you want that the installer doesn't provide. And we used to think that commercially purchased software was limited and restrictive!Strange how the open source is heading into the same direction. Because functionality doesn't grow on trees? This is approaching ridiculous (if not past it), and you know what ridiculous means? Deserving of ridicule. Are you ready? So, you want to tell people: first partition your drive with some other tools before you use anaconda to install Fedora, and then? It's called a point and shoot installer. Once the media is prepared, you point the installer to the target(s) created in the previous utility, and the system is installed. Not rocket science, not complicated, not new. This is how Apple has done it since forever. Newbies might not even know that Anaconda might still decide to take it's own default and clobber whatever the user did as far as pre-partitioning. If you leave enough free space, yes guided installation will use that and ignore precreated things, hence the pre-partitioning is neither clobbered nor used. In every other case the user becomes complicit in the clobbering (reclaim space or assigning mount points). In fact the very first option displayed by anaconda is to use anaconda's default partitioning scheme. Even if anaconda will warn the user of what it will clobber, many newbies will not necessarily understand the consequences. It only installs to free space. If all free space is taken, then you could argue reclaim space UI is cryptic for newbies because it deals with the esoterics of literal partitions, and combines passive determination of user intent into a single UI. The user needs to understand, and then convey, what the details of what they want to do (recognize partition purposes, select the right one, delete or resize it) before the installer knows intent rather than the reverse. The old UI sorta did this part better because you could explicitly tell it to replace an existing linux OS, or erase the whole drive. It had some (rudimentary) semblance of use case selection before involving the user in the details. So this could be seen as a regression. But that's an argument in favor of going farther with the paradigm new UI has overall opted for; to make things simpler, capable, less complicate, less esoteric, more stable, and yes less manual. Seriously get over it, manual control is overrated! Manual shift vs automatic shift. The automatics now have better gas mileage so that argument is lost. The CVTs are in every way better than shift or fixed ratio automatic shift transmissions. Anaconda has some room before it's a CVT, but the idea that manual control in and of itself is better or a good or a right or proper, it's absurd. I'll beat that dead horse into horse burgers. Myself, I always know how to tell anaconda I will manually partition the drive, without resorting to external tools. But I cannot assume that ALL other people have the know-how to manually partition their drives. Nor should they. Check the partitioning of a mobile device, it has more than a dozen partitions, the user doesn't need to be involved in this at all yet they benefit. It is possible to have an overall better experience, faster development, less bugs, but giving up this senseless emotional attachment to manual partitioning just for the sake of control. -- Chris Murphy -- users mailing list users@lists.fedoraproject.org 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
Re: F21 partitioning circus
On 02/23/2015 10:15 PM, Pete Travis wrote: On Feb 23, 2015 1:26 PM, Chris Murphy li...@colorremedies.com I don't think it came up in this thread, but I've seen partition ordering cited in this context as well: user wants /boot on sda1, / on sda2, /home on sda3, /opt on sda5, /usr/local on /sda6, and so on. In most of those cases, there wasn't a technical reason for this or some automated code with partition expectations - just arbitrary preference. Not quite. Sometimes there are technical reasons. E.g. Some (all?) BIOSes aren't able to boot from non-primary partitions. With a preinstalled WinXP often having occupied 3 primary partitions (BOOT, WIN, RECOVER), Installing more than one Linux, required you to install a linux boot partition as the 4th primary partition. Similar restriction apply elsewhere. E.g. I have an older BIOS system which for (at least to me) unknown reasons refuses to boot from chained/cascaded grub partitions beyond some disk-limits. In more complex multiboot configurations (e.g. several different linux distros, several releases of the same distro, several different configurations of the same distro), other aspects come into play, which more or less are personal preference, such as keeping an OSs' partitions consecutively together, whether to share or not to share boot or swap partitions etc. Experience tells, any sharing, such as sharing grub or swap partitions, will fail in longer terms - Unfortunately, some distros' installers by default do so and automatically try to reuse such partitions (IIRC, anaconda still does so, till today) So really, if this stuff bothers you, sit down, come up with a rational justification for the feature you want, and send it in. Most developers in this space do listen, but the normal rules of polite human interaction and rational discourse do apply. Because that's that I want isn't a good way to ask for someone else's time. But the converse applies: A tool which doesn't suffice my needs, will not be my choice and will loose me as a customer Ralf -- users mailing list users@lists.fedoraproject.org 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
Re: F21 partitioning circus
On 02/23/2015 04:23 PM, Ian Pilcher wrote: On 02/23/2015 01:13 PM, jd1008 wrote: I think it does make sense, because users would like to custom partition the drive(s) and live with that partitioning scheme for many years. So, all such options should be made available. A responder to this thread mentioned that there should be an expert mode in Anaconda where the user accepts all the consequences of her/his choice(s). What is the benefit of having anaconda worry about *creating* these partitioning schemes (for lack of a better term)? Provide flexibilty for users who would want schemes other than anaconda's defaults and very limited partitioning options. Seems to me anacaonda is heading the way of a closed tool that assumes one hat fits all. And we used to think that commercially purchased software was limited and restrictive!Strange how the open source is heading into the same direction. Wouldn't it be better to ask people to use the regular tools in a live media environment for anything other than a very basic scheme and save anaconda dev time for ensuring that it is able to *use* as many pre- existing schemes as possible as reliably as possible? So, you want to tell people: first partition your drive with some other tools before you use anaconda to install Fedora, and then? Newbies might not even know that Anaconda might still decide to take it's own default and clobber whatever the user did as far as pre-partitioning. In fact the very first option displayed by anaconda is to use anaconda's default partitioning scheme. Even if anaconda will warn the user of what it will clobber, many newbies will not necessarily understand the consequences. Myself, I always know how to tell anaconda I will manually partition the drive, without resorting to external tools. But I cannot assume that ALL other people have the know-how to manually partition their drives. -- users mailing list users@lists.fedoraproject.org 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
Re: F21 partitioning circus
On Feb 24, 2015 11:40 AM, jd1008 jd1...@gmail.com wrote: On 02/23/2015 04:23 PM, Ian Pilcher wrote: On 02/23/2015 01:13 PM, jd1008 wrote: I think it does make sense, because users would like to custom partition the drive(s) and live with that partitioning scheme for many years. So, all such options should be made available. A responder to this thread mentioned that there should be an expert mode in Anaconda where the user accepts all the consequences of her/his choice(s). What is the benefit of having anaconda worry about *creating* these partitioning schemes (for lack of a better term)? Provide flexibilty for users who would want schemes other than anaconda's defaults and very limited partitioning options. Seems to me anacaonda is heading the way of a closed tool that assumes one hat fits all. And we used to think that commercially purchased software was limited and restrictive!Strange how the open source is heading into the same direction. Wouldn't it be better to ask people to use the regular tools in a live media environment for anything other than a very basic scheme and save anaconda dev time for ensuring that it is able to *use* as many pre- existing schemes as possible as reliably as possible? So, you want to tell people: first partition your drive with some other tools before you use anaconda to install Fedora, and then? Newbies might not even know that Anaconda might still decide to take it's own default and clobber whatever the user did as far as pre-partitioning. In fact the very first option displayed by anaconda is to use anaconda's default partitioning scheme. Even if anaconda will warn the user of what it will clobber, many newbies will not necessarily understand the consequences. Myself, I always know how to tell anaconda I will manually partition the drive, without resorting to external tools. But I cannot assume that ALL other people have the know-how to manually partition their drives. -- Usually newbies don't need to custom partition their drives. Usually when newbies do pre-partition their drives, it is because they have some misconception that it was necessary, as in they thought I want to also install Fedora on this computer, so I will create one partition to install Fedora on - not knowing that one partition for an installation of any Linux distribution falls somewhere between terrible idea and not supported , and always has. Maybe they're getting ideas like that from non-specific mailing list rants, or maybe it's just routine, forgivable ignorance. For most all new user partitioning issues I've encountered, I've offered the same advice: Stop doing that, make unallocated space, use the installer to do your partitioning, partition automatically if you are confused. Following this advice has resulted in a functional Fedora installation and happy user *every time* - with *one* exception: users who had, in the past, for reasons of personal preference or ignorance, created four primary partitions on an MBR drive. Since this thread has gone on a while, I'll close the loop: the only situation where I have seen anaconda's partitioning fail a newbie user is the caused by the very feature that the original poster is requesting. So, what, concretely, is your complaint? Please share what circumstances you envision a new user encountering that would merit your antagonism, so that it can be addresses in either documentation or code. --Pete -- users mailing list users@lists.fedoraproject.org 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
Re: F21 partitioning circus
On Tue, Feb 24, 2015 at 8:51 AM, Ralf Corsepius rc040...@freenet.de wrote: E.g. Some (all?) BIOSes aren't able to boot from non-primary partitions. I'm pretty sure it's a non-factor if GRUB is used because GRUB boot.img (formerly stage1) in the first 440 bytes is just jump code to core.img. It doesn't depend on partitions or the setting of the active flag at all. The limitation might be how big an LBA value it can jump to however, but AFAIK any BIOS in the last ~5 years has 64bit LBA support, while drives are still only 48-bit. I'd think it's quite an old computer for firmware to have less than 48-bit LBA support. For extlinux, yes this is probably an issue because it uses a handful of generic code sets for LBA0's first 440 bytes, which depend on the active flag being set on a primary partition. With a preinstalled WinXP often having occupied 3 primary partitions (BOOT, WIN, RECOVER), Installing more than one Linux, required you to install a linux boot partition as the 4th primary partition. I haven't seen this because in such a case GRUB's ~440 bytes boot.img replaces the Windows code in LBA 0, which instructs a jump to core.img which typically starts at LBA1 (the start of the MBR gap). Once core.img is loaded, GRUB can now read a partition table and filesystem directly, and can find its modules even on an extended partition (even inside LVM, or LVM on RAID even if it's degraded - it's really kinda amazing). Similar restriction apply elsewhere. E.g. I have an older BIOS system which for (at least to me) unknown reasons refuses to boot from chained/cascaded grub partitions beyond some disk-limits. Quite old, either 28-bit LBA limit, or maybe BIOS that still only groks CHS. This is probably in the realm of the crusty INT 13H stuff. In more complex multiboot configurations (e.g. several different linux distros, several releases of the same distro, several different configurations of the same distro), other aspects come into play, which more or less are personal preference, such as keeping an OSs' partitions consecutively together, whether to share or not to share boot or swap partitions etc. Right and this cannot possibly be supported by Fedora absent an agreed upon boot specification. There are attempts, but even our own GRUB patches in the form of bls.mod to implement the freedesktop.org bootloaderspec, does not exactly conform to the spec and ends up having various problems. So we don't interoperate very well with ourselves, we don't interoperate within either of the two bootloader spec variants, we don't have multiple distro support. And GRUB upstream doesn't really seem to care that much about the problem either or it would be entirely solved there. Even if all of that were surmounted, and we had a ratified spec and everyone said they'd conform, we'd still have the reality of doing the implementation work, which is non-trivial and involves more than just GRUB. So... this knowledge acts as an scary inhibitor to even going down the road of settling on a spec, I think. Experience tells, any sharing, such as sharing grub or swap partitions, will fail in longer terms - Unfortunately, some distros' installers by default do so and automatically try to reuse such partitions (IIRC, anaconda still does so, till today) So really, if this stuff bothers you, sit down, come up with a rational justification for the feature you want, and send it in. Most developers in this space do listen, but the normal rules of polite human interaction and rational discourse do apply. Because that's that I want isn't a good way to ask for someone else's time. But the converse applies: A tool which doesn't suffice my needs, will not be my choice and will loose me as a customer Yes, but it's a 60+ email thread and the people complaining about Anaconda Manual Partitioning, especially the custom isn't custom claim, haven't produced any examples or bugs of what they want to do that the installer won't allow. -- Chris Murphy -- users mailing list users@lists.fedoraproject.org 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
Re: F21 partitioning circus
[snip] This was a good thread and is tied in with my experience this weekend. I had a very old laptop with F13 that had not been booted in years. I tried to load F21 on it using the same partitions (and keeping the old Windows partitions). Anaconda more or less let me try but gave me a warning about /boot being below the RECOMMENDED size (not that it would not work). F21 installed without any indicated errors. However I got an OOPS on first boot. I was able to boot into the recovery partition and inspect the /boot. The initrd for normal boot was incomplete and the /boot was full. I did NOT receive an error on install. IMHO, this was a silent failure (bug reported). Yes, there are those of us who have done interesting things with our partitioning over the years. We would like to continue to be able to manually partition, manually setup RAID, and do similar things.Its definitely not good for the average user, but some of us need it. However, we should see errors when things fail Cheers, -- Wade Hampton -- users mailing list users@lists.fedoraproject.org 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
Re: F21 partitioning circus
On 22.02.2015 23:55, Matthew Miller wrote: ... * I mean, literally: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Vision_statement People write all kinds of stuff on the walls, Miller. -- users mailing list users@lists.fedoraproject.org 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
Re: F21 partitioning circus
Ohh, can someone help? I would like to install a coffee grinder, multi boot with Fedora if possible? Coffee Coffee Coffee http://goo.gl/7nPcsB -- users mailing list users@lists.fedoraproject.org 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
Re: F21 partitioning circus
On 23.02.2015 08:44, Tim wrote: On Sun, 2015-02-22 at 15:01 -0700, Chris Murphy wrote: What you're talking about might be in-scope for blivet-gui. It definitely sounds out of scope for a GUI OS installer. Windows, OS X installers have maybe 2-3 total layouts between them. And their installers are completely, totally, bullet proof. They don't ever crash, or ask the user to create required partitions, they always succeed in their penultimate goal which is to install a bootable OS. And there are essentially zero user complaints about these installers. There's nothing at all to even complain about because they don't do anything except meet their primary requirement. Not even their developers or testers even complain about the installer, it does one thing successfully. While I don't find it hard to believe that Windows developers won't complain. After all, just about all Windows users do is install Windows as a new install, or over the top of a previous one, with no intention of doing anything like dual-boot. Shoe-horn it in, that's all they care about. These days, it's all single-partition, or act like it's single-partition with a hidden boot/recovery partition that the user doesn't know about. I find it harder to believe that users don't complain about the Windows installer. I've certainly seen it fuck up, and I can't be the only one. It was a gamble to see whether an install over the top could manage to keep existing data, never mind settings. And trying to get it to install to the right drive in a two-drive PC was nothing but trial and error (one drive for Windows, a second drive for video on a non-linear editing suite). I, also, am rather incredulous of how difficult it is to have the Linux installer simply do what the user tells it to do, instead of second-guessing them and denying them of what they want to do. If I select custom partition, and edit partitions myself, type of options, I expect it to have a GUI that does what I tell it to do. In the past, before the live DVD install era, I'd boot the install disc and wait for to pause on some screen, then CTRL + ALT + FUNCTION-KEY to another terminal, and fdisc my hard drive, and go back to the installer and have it use my pre-defined partitions. Even further back, I'd select the options to check partitions for faults, rather than get a nasty surprise a few months in when the drive reaches a certain amount of fullness and comes across a bad section. I don't know what's really so hard about giving us a simple GUI hard drive partitioner somewhere in the install routine. Using the command line tool is a pain (e.g. you cannot see any details about the rest of the drive while you're working on making a partition), and there are other standalone GUI partitioning tools that exist. Leave the so-called automatic smart partitioning to those people who choose the full-automatic option. Don't be depressed, who care about proprietary nonsense crap, in the first place. :) -- users mailing list users@lists.fedoraproject.org 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
Re: F21 partitioning circus
On 23.02.2015 01:19, Alex Regan wrote: Hi, On 02/22/2015 06:43 PM, Chris Murphy wrote: On Sun, Feb 22, 2015 at 3:39 PM, Heinz Diehl htd...@fritha.org wrote: On 22.02.2015, Chris Murphy wrote: Windows, OS X installers have maybe 2-3 total layouts between them. And their installers are completely, totally, bullet proof. They don't ever crash, or ask the user to create required partitions, they always succeed in their penultimate goal which is to install a bootable OS. Frankly, the vast majority of the users of those operating systems aren't even capable of installing them by themselves. The users don't know these things because they don't have to know them, not the other way around. There's no benefit in them knowing such things it's not intrinsically valuable knowledge for the majority. It's sufficient that a scant minority know such things. Look at even Android and cyanogen. Look at the reinvention of all OS's for mobile devices and how much simpler things are when constraining choices. Chromebooks are in that same category. Simple. Just works. They picked a layout and stuck with it. And that's not to say the layout of my cyanogen phone is exactly simple, it uses GPT partition scheme, and has 28 partitions. (Of course that's not by my choice, I had no say.) On a somewhat-related note, is it now possible with F21 to create a RAID1 /boot? I can see this as being one reason for an escape to parted/fdisk option. I'm curious why this option has been so elusive for anaconda over the years? A situation where a failed /dev/sda in an otherwise RAID5 system is really unfortunate and requires a whole lot of extra work when things go bad. Thanks, Alex EXTLINUX RAID1 intro https://www.redhat.com/archives/anaconda-devel-list/2013-June/msg00032.html At the time this worked for me. ;) -- users mailing list users@lists.fedoraproject.org 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
Re: F21 partitioning circus
On Mon, Feb 23, 2015 at 12:44 AM, Tim ignored_mail...@yahoo.com.au wrote: While I don't find it hard to believe that Windows developers won't complain. After all, just about all Windows users do is install Windows as a new install, or over the top of a previous one, with no intention of doing anything like dual-boot. Windows 8 has made a huge leap forward in terms of statelessness. The refresh, reset, and restore options all work quite well and don't use any installer at all. The installer itself does new installations and upgrades, and I'd say upgrade comparison is now out of scope since Anaconda doesn't do upgrades anymore, that's left to fedup. Both Windows and OS X do support, explicitly, dual boot either two version n's, or version n already installed, and a new version n+1, reliably. However, both of them use separate utilities for doing fs resizing for these cases, it's not built into the general purpose installer. Further, OS X explicitly supports dual boot with Windows, going so far as to prepare itself to accept an ordinary default Windows installation. And again that's yet another utility, it's not rolled into a giant monolithic installation program. Meanwhile, Fedora can't manage version n, version n+1, default installations without breaking the earlier version (due to LVM not being enabled), and is a nearly three year old bug. https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=825236 Because there are thousands of possible layouts among Linux OS's, it's instantly non-deterministic to support dual boot on all of them. To do better requires some standardization, and all you have to do is look at the state of bootloaderspec to realize almost no one gives a shit about this problem enough to compromise on it. They give a shit enough to complain about the woeful state of cooperation among Linux distros, but from start to finish Linux can't even standardize on one or two bootloaders, or baring that they can't standardize all bootloaders on a single configuration file format for those bootloaders, or they can't come up with a standard on disk layout or self describing one by which discovery could be dynamic rather than relying on antiquated static configuration files in the first place. So from start to finish, dual boot is basically shit. Trying to automate this has been one of the biggest nightmarish black holes I've encountered, and really has exemplified the worst that can happen in FOSS when there's insufficient cooperation and every distro tries to build their own highway from the garage to downtown. And multiboot is so beyond shit, I might have to first invent a new category of profanity to do that one justice in explaining. Yet again, it's a lack of discipline, and a bunch of people demanding 1000+1 more knob for their cockamamie use case. You know what? Fine, do that in the CLI. Please don't defecate on the GUI, it makes them untrustworthy. Our brains are wired to pattern recognition, and upon associating mistrust with a GUI is very damaging and expensive to unwind that mistrust. I, also, am rather incredulous of how difficult it is to have the Linux installer simply do what the user tells it to do, instead of second-guessing them and denying them of what they want to do. If I select custom partition, and edit partitions myself, type of options, I expect it to have a GUI that does what I tell it to do. Please cite a bug. There's no doubt in my mind there are still lots of bugs in the installer. But I keep hearing this level of cognitive dissonance from folks who seem to think things are simple when they're told they aren't. If you don't believe me, fine, go look at the code. But please don't keep spouting this notion that making the installer do what you want is an easy thing. Every feature will include dozens, or hundreds of bugs. It's inevitable. And again, Windows and OS X installers, they don't crash. I've tried. I'm a goddamn bug magnet. To this day I'm still finding crashing bugs in Anaconda, and the reason is because of code churn and lack of stabilization because new functionality keeps being added. If it were a brain dead installer, I guarantee you it would at least be stable. I don't know what's really so hard about giving us a simple GUI hard drive partitioner somewhere in the install routine. Please go code one yourself. You have 5 minutes to make Peking Duck, even though I know it takes at least an hour to make it. I really don't see what so hard about you doing this, seeing as by your own admission it isn't hard. I will even offer to troubleshoot it. But be prepared for vitriolic levels of criticism when you f up basic things. If you come back with something inside of 6 months, I will eat my hat. Using the command line tool is a pain (e.g. you cannot see any details about the rest of the drive while you're working on making a partition), and there are other standalone GUI partitioning tools that exist. If you really want partitions, why aren't you
Re: F21 partitioning circus
On 02/23/2015 12:56 PM, Chris Murphy wrote: If you really want partitions, why aren't you doing this with gparted then? What's the problem with that workflow? Why do you need it integrated in Anaconda? One of the constraints on what anaconda can do comes from space limitations, especially on the Live media. (One of the reasons why I've always used the full install DVD.) Is there room to include GParted and have anaconda call it if needed? -- users mailing list users@lists.fedoraproject.org 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
Re: F21 partitioning circus
On 02/23/2015 01:03 PM, Chris Murphy wrote: And you have backups right? Because by definition it's not important unless you have backups. First, I'd like to point out that just because the installer isn't supposed to modify your partitions without your explicitly selecting them doesn't mean that it never happens. It's always possible for a bug to rear its ugly head and mark /home for reformatting even though you've specified that it's to be used as is, or for a bit to flip, changing the value of a flag. However, I must agree with you about backups. I've given new users instructions on how to set things up so that /home can be preserved across new installations many times, but I've also told them to create a backup, Just In Case. -- users mailing list users@lists.fedoraproject.org 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
Re: F21 partitioning circus
On Mon, Feb 23, 2015 at 11:29 AM, Rick Stevens ri...@alldigital.com wrote: This has been a discussion for quite a while over on the devel list (the shortcomings/obfuscation in anaconda). I'd highly suggest that you put in your $0.02 over there. I have for quite a while but I guess I don't carry a lot of weight over there. I'll tell you what, let's play a game. I call it, vet this probably really bad idea before posting it on devel@. Put your use case up on this list, and get just 5 users to vote in favor of it, while not one person puts forth an effective contra argument proving that it's actually dangerous to others. That might be a good basic litmus test before going on devel@ and flinging pies at people. Mind you, Anaconda developers don't really monitor devel@, they have their own list (which might be part of the problem with there are major disagreements surrounding the installer but that's a different matter). I'm with you. Should anaconda see a manually-laid-out partition scheme, it should honor it. Saying things does not make it true. However, one of the installer team's stated goals is to support preexisting layouts, just by assigning mountpoints to volumes. So if you can't do that, file a bug or cite bug here instead of just suggesting it can't be done. And please stop calling it a partition scheme. Only one of the support device types in Anaconda even deals with partitions directly and that's Standard Partitions. On Btrfs it's using subvolumes as mount points. On LVM it's using LVs or vsize LV's. These things are not all partitions and that's the primary reason why the installer isn't partition centric anymore. It's volumes and mountpoints oriented, that's what's consistent across each device type. It should also permit one to create a partition scheme that meets one's own needs without having to spin twice in an anticlockwise direction on your right foot while quoting Omar Khayyam and then sacrificing a goat under a full moon on the Nazca plains. You're right, you've found a bug. That's definitely the wrong ritualistic incantation to compel the installer to be permissive of a bad idea it can't possibly understand. -- Chris Murphy -- users mailing list users@lists.fedoraproject.org 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
Re: F21 partitioning circus
On 02/23/2015 01:22 PM, Chris Murphy wrote: I mean... fucking seriously. I'm going to go buy a bucket and a mallet. Back when I did senior tech support for an ISP, we used headsets with long cords so that we could move around during a call. I always arranged things so that I was near a pillar so that I could bang my head against it when I was dealing with a less than cooperative caller. (Why they called if they weren't going to follow instructions is a question I never asked, because I was afraid that the answer might make sense.) It was an excellent way to express my frustration without letting the caller know what I thought of them and besides, it felt so *good* when I stopped. -- users mailing list users@lists.fedoraproject.org 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
Re: F21 partitioning circus
On Mon, Feb 23, 2015 at 2:10 AM, Andrew R Paterson andy.pater...@ntlworld.com wrote: I have to say I find this disucssion interesting I have spent what amounts to a small fortune (for me!) making sure that when I upgrade from one version of LINUX to another (initially slackware but so far fedora 9 - 20) that I can minimise the risk of (anaconda or whatever the current installer might be) deciding in its wisdom whilst doing the partitioning that it thinks best, blowing away my /opt and/home partitions - It's comments like this that make me want to grab a metal bucket, put it on my head, and start hitting myself with a mallet. To delete and existing /opt or /home requires explicit user intervention for this to happen. It doesn't happen by itself. You have to a.) click the mount point, b.) click the minus (-) button to indicate you want it removed, and c.) the installer produces a dialog indicating it's going to be deleted, along with a cancel button, and d.) the installer produces a summary of changes at the very end of the Manual Partitioning process THAT FUCKING HIGHLIGHTS THIS SHIT IN RED LETTERS indicating it will be deleted. So what is it *EXACTLY* that you're experiencing? And what is it *EXACTLY* you think you should experience instead? If you can't do that, please stop offering opinions about how you need to minimize risk due to the installer. This the compsci equivalent of hypochondria... which have nearly 20 years of accumulated digital clutter! And you have backups right? Because by definition it's not important unless you have backups. -- Chris Murphy -- users mailing list users@lists.fedoraproject.org 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
Re: F21 partitioning circus
On Mon, Feb 23, 2015 at 8:11 AM, Wade Hampton wadehampto...@gmail.com wrote: [snip] This was a good thread and is tied in with my experience this weekend. I had a very old laptop with F13 that had not been booted in years. I tried to load F21 on it using the same partitions (and keeping the old Windows partitions). Anaconda more or less let me try but gave me a warning about /boot being below the RECOMMENDED size (not that it would not work). There's a thread on test@ Does anyone reuse /boot or /var partitions? that explores some of this. But I think if you can reproduce this, you need to file a bug, I don't see how else such things get fixed because this is not a Fedora QA test case to reuse or share /boot because it's not best practices. If the installer is going to permit a non-empty /boot to be used for installation, then it should check free space not volume size; and fail with a clear warning. Such checks are a nice little pile of code and further require translations due to the warning. And that's why I'm more in favor of non-empty /boot being unsupported. That's not the same thing as requiring it to be reformatted, but if the installer team were to go that route I think that's better than the shared case which is simply dysfunctional and inconsistent with the FHS as well. The long standing history is that /boot is owned/paired with a particular root fs. End of discussion. There's just no good that comes from trying to support arbitrary content and avoid stepping on things, not least of which is that a pile of bootloader code and configuration (all of which is distro specific and are mutually incompatible since distros maintain their own substantially different GRUB forks, in effect) that's distro specific contained in /boot. So this is a Do Not Pass Go as far as I'm concerned. F21 installed without any indicated errors. However I got an OOPS on first boot. I was able to boot into the recovery partition and inspect the /boot. The initrd for normal boot was incomplete and the /boot was full. I did NOT receive an error on install. IMHO, this was a silent failure (bug reported). Yes I'd say that's at least one bug. The installer should be aware if dracut or new-kernel-pkg exited with something other than 0 and would report that to the user. So there's some missing error checking (which may or may not actually be the installer's fault); and another bug if that error checking doesn't have a practical way of being implemented, the installer needs to simply disallow non-empty /boot as well as ones that have insufficient space. Yes, there are those of us who have done interesting things with our partitioning over the years. We would like to continue to be able to manually partition, manually setup RAID, and do similar things.Its definitely not good for the average user, but some of us need it. However, we should see errors when things fail Or flat out indicate that the layout isn't supported, so that you don't end up going down a rabbit hole thinking it is supported, only to encounter an error later in process, or worse, once Begin Installation has been clicked and on-disk changes have already been made. Better to pre-fail than fail later. And it's not like I've seen anyone (except me) post bugs demonstrating their installer failure cases. -- Chris Murphy -- users mailing list users@lists.fedoraproject.org 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
Re: F21 partitioning circus
On Feb 23, 2015 1:26 PM, Chris Murphy li...@colorremedies.com wrote: On Sun, Feb 22, 2015 at 11:23 PM, Ralf Corsepius rc040...@freenet.de wrote: In my experience, anaconda is the #1 point, many people (ordinary users and power users) are complaining about when getting in contact with Fedora and is the #1 reason why they are shying away from installing Fedora (When talking to non-Fedora users, the first question very often is Is the installer still the crap it used to be?.) This is what happens when the installer offers a gigantic smörgåsbord before a total rewrite: everyone is used to their specialty dish in the buffet and will get totally pissed off when their stinky dish no one else will touch isn't offered in the revamp. Unsurprising. The ordinary user use case should be bullet proof. I argued strenuously for Manual Partitioning features to work or be stripped from the UI. I think it's bad for GUIs to offer broken things, because it makes them untrustworthy, and we can't have that. I think that's been proven to be correct, even though hindsight is 20/20 too, the reality is too much was bitten off, much more than could be chewed, and more than Anaconda had help with from these power users who wanted all of these (highly questionable) use cases supported as if it's easy. Guy: CHEF! Make me Peking Duck to go, you have 5 minutes! Chef: Umm, well I can't make Peking Duck in 5 minutes, it takes an hour. Guy: Idiot! It's really just noise. In many ways I think the power user was excessively coddled during the rewrite. The scope should have been significantly narrowed, the main uses cases made bullet proof and then refined, before any Manual Partitioning should even have been included. I filed over 100 bugs on newUI a lot of which had to do with Manual Partitioning and quite honestly I wish I could get that time back. To newbies the GUI is cryptical and non-selfexplatory, while to power-users the GUI doesn't provide the features catering their demands and clumsy to use. Ok well, unless the power users are filing coherent bugs and/or contributing code, their demands are edge cases that probably shouldn't be supported. The newbies always have legitimate complaints. They're completely innocent in all of this, and that's where I'd have put resources. And in terms of prioritizing, I think i18n needed more resources, accessibility needs more resources, and I'm sure we can find some other enhancements to the installer well before more Manual Partitioning enhancements happen. Me: That's a difficult problem to solve, the result is the user still thinks they're supposed to be able to manipulate partitions. IMO, this is a distorted view. People want to understand what the installer does and to have control over it. The current GUI does not do so and instead applies some magic which people have learnt does not do what they want. People who aren't filing bugs, who aren't contributing code, want what? If the use case is viable, and helps a large percent of users, then I think this could be done. But please feel free to be specific, rather than generally casting the installer with a broad brush that suggests the GUI doesn't at all do what anyone wants ever. -- Chris Murphy -- Well said. Any use case with a sole justification of because that's the way I like it has questionable merit. I don't think it came up in this thread, but I've seen partition ordering cited in this context as well: user wants /boot on sda1, / on sda2, /home on sda3, /opt on sda5, /usr/local on /sda6, and so on. In most of those cases, there wasn't a technical reason for this or some automated code with partition expectations - just arbitrary preference. Changing every possible option away from the default does not make you a power user. The lack of options for choices with zero or less technical merit does not diminish your skills. Roughly 149 out of every 100 people that would choose to take Hienz's no extended partition option would regret it, and often not understand the implications even after the negative impact was felt. If you're doing the math in your head, figure in about a third of people choosing the same unsuitable option again because that's what they want, then another third of that group do it again because that's what they want and nevermind the warnings, and another third of *that* group because the system should do what *I want*, not what *it* thinks is possible. With each iteration people give up on the installer and distribution because they were able to to configure the installation the way they wanted, but didn't end up with the configuration they *needed*. That's a lot of dissatisfaction to risk when deciding how to devote coding time. So really, if this stuff bothers you, sit down, come up with a rational justification for the feature you want, and send it in. Most developers in this space do listen, but the normal rules of
Re: F21 partitioning circus
On Mon, Feb 23, 2015 at 2:03 PM, Chris Murphy li...@colorremedies.com wrote: To delete and existing /opt or /home requires explicit user intervention for this to happen. It doesn't happen by itself. You have to a.) click the mount point, b.) click the minus (-) button to indicate you want it removed, and c.) the installer produces a dialog indicating it's going to be deleted, along with a cancel button, and d.) the installer produces a summary of changes at the very end of the Manual Partitioning process THAT FUCKING HIGHLIGHTS THIS SHIT IN RED LETTERS indicating it will be deleted. e.) THIS SHIT IN RED LETTERS, is *still* not deleted! You have to click on Begin Installation for your drive to actually get touched. I mean... fucking seriously. I'm going to go buy a bucket and a mallet. -- Chris Murphy -- users mailing list users@lists.fedoraproject.org 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
Re: F21 partitioning circus
On 02/23/2015 11:01 AM, Ian Pilcher wrote: On 02/22/2015 01:31 PM, jd1008 wrote: Seems like the Anaconda UI could provide much clearer explanations of available choices, and the consequenes of those choices (i.e. their impact on the drives/partitions that are VISIBLE to Anaconda). Does it even make sense to Anaconda to worry about creating anything but a very, very basic partitioning scheme in the age of live media? I think it does make sense, because users would like to custom partition the drive(s) and live with that partitioning scheme for many years. So, all such options should be made available. A responder to this thread mentioned that there should be an expert mode in Anaconda where the user accepts all the consequences of her/his choice(s). Cheers, JD -- users mailing list users@lists.fedoraproject.org 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
Re: F21 partitioning circus
On 02/22/2015 01:31 PM, jd1008 wrote: Seems like the Anaconda UI could provide much clearer explanations of available choices, and the consequenes of those choices (i.e. their impact on the drives/partitions that are VISIBLE to Anaconda). Does it even make sense to Anaconda to worry about creating anything but a very, very basic partitioning scheme in the age of live media? -- Ian Pilcher arequip...@gmail.com I grew up before Mark Zuckerberg invented friendship -- users mailing list users@lists.fedoraproject.org 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
Re: F21 partitioning circus
On 02/23/2015 10:01 AM, Ian Pilcher wrote: On 02/22/2015 01:31 PM, jd1008 wrote: Seems like the Anaconda UI could provide much clearer explanations of available choices, and the consequenes of those choices (i.e. their impact on the drives/partitions that are VISIBLE to Anaconda). Does it even make sense to Anaconda to worry about creating anything but a very, very basic partitioning scheme in the age of live media? This has been a discussion for quite a while over on the devel list (the shortcomings/obfuscation in anaconda). I'd highly suggest that you put in your $0.02 over there. I have for quite a while but I guess I don't carry a lot of weight over there. I'm with you. Should anaconda see a manually-laid-out partition scheme, it should honor it. It should also permit one to create a partition scheme that meets one's own needs without having to spin twice in an anticlockwise direction on your right foot while quoting Omar Khayyam and then sacrificing a goat under a full moon on the Nazca plains. Now they're talking about anaconda enforcing its own concept of what a secure password is (and a number of people have demonstrated that some of the simplest passwords pass its security test--so I have no idea what they consider secure). I've been railing against this impudence and I think I've moved the peg a bit, but not enough. Get over onto the devel list and start raising some hell. Perhaps they'll listen to us real users a bit more. -- - Rick Stevens, Systems Engineer, AllDigitalri...@alldigital.com - - AIM/Skype: therps2ICQ: 22643734Yahoo: origrps2 - -- - Do you suffer from long-term memory loss? I don't remember - --- Chumbawumba, Amnesia (TubThumping) - -- -- users mailing list users@lists.fedoraproject.org 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
Re: F21 partitioning circus
On Sun, Feb 22, 2015 at 11:23 PM, Ralf Corsepius rc040...@freenet.de wrote: In my experience, anaconda is the #1 point, many people (ordinary users and power users) are complaining about when getting in contact with Fedora and is the #1 reason why they are shying away from installing Fedora (When talking to non-Fedora users, the first question very often is Is the installer still the crap it used to be?.) This is what happens when the installer offers a gigantic smörgåsbord before a total rewrite: everyone is used to their specialty dish in the buffet and will get totally pissed off when their stinky dish no one else will touch isn't offered in the revamp. Unsurprising. The ordinary user use case should be bullet proof. I argued strenuously for Manual Partitioning features to work or be stripped from the UI. I think it's bad for GUIs to offer broken things, because it makes them untrustworthy, and we can't have that. I think that's been proven to be correct, even though hindsight is 20/20 too, the reality is too much was bitten off, much more than could be chewed, and more than Anaconda had help with from these power users who wanted all of these (highly questionable) use cases supported as if it's easy. Guy: CHEF! Make me Peking Duck to go, you have 5 minutes! Chef: Umm, well I can't make Peking Duck in 5 minutes, it takes an hour. Guy: Idiot! It's really just noise. In many ways I think the power user was excessively coddled during the rewrite. The scope should have been significantly narrowed, the main uses cases made bullet proof and then refined, before any Manual Partitioning should even have been included. I filed over 100 bugs on newUI a lot of which had to do with Manual Partitioning and quite honestly I wish I could get that time back. To newbies the GUI is cryptical and non-selfexplatory, while to power-users the GUI doesn't provide the features catering their demands and clumsy to use. Ok well, unless the power users are filing coherent bugs and/or contributing code, their demands are edge cases that probably shouldn't be supported. The newbies always have legitimate complaints. They're completely innocent in all of this, and that's where I'd have put resources. And in terms of prioritizing, I think i18n needed more resources, accessibility needs more resources, and I'm sure we can find some other enhancements to the installer well before more Manual Partitioning enhancements happen. Me: That's a difficult problem to solve, the result is the user still thinks they're supposed to be able to manipulate partitions. IMO, this is a distorted view. People want to understand what the installer does and to have control over it. The current GUI does not do so and instead applies some magic which people have learnt does not do what they want. People who aren't filing bugs, who aren't contributing code, want what? If the use case is viable, and helps a large percent of users, then I think this could be done. But please feel free to be specific, rather than generally casting the installer with a broad brush that suggests the GUI doesn't at all do what anyone wants ever. -- Chris Murphy -- users mailing list users@lists.fedoraproject.org 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
Re: F21 partitioning circus
On Mon, Feb 23, 2015 at 2:26 PM, Joe Zeff j...@zeff.us wrote: On 02/23/2015 01:03 PM, Chris Murphy wrote: And you have backups right? Because by definition it's not important unless you have backups. First, I'd like to point out that just because the installer isn't supposed to modify your partitions without your explicitly selecting them doesn't mean that it never happens. OK I have probably well in excess of 500 man hours testing Anaconda over the past couple of years, and I've never seen it. And I'm a bug magnet. I make things break just by looking at them. So if there's no bug citation I'm considering this in the realm of conjecture. It's a unicorn. It's always possible for a bug to rear its ugly head and mark /home for reformatting even though you've specified that it's to be used as is, or for a bit to flip, changing the value of a flag. Umm? OK well the moon could possibly fracture tomorrow and we all die. What you're talking about has no potential for mitigation. It's not a reproducible bug, it's just bad luck. -- Chris Murphy -- users mailing list users@lists.fedoraproject.org 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
Re: F21 partitioning circus
On Monday 23 February 2015 14:03:17 Chris Murphy wrote: On Mon, Feb 23, 2015 at 2:10 AM, Andrew R Paterson andy.pater...@ntlworld.com wrote: I have to say I find this disucssion interesting I have spent what amounts to a small fortune (for me!) making sure that when I upgrade from one version of LINUX to another (initially slackware but so far fedora 9 - 20) that I can minimise the risk of (anaconda or whatever the current installer might be) deciding in its wisdom whilst doing the partitioning that it thinks best, blowing away my /opt and/home partitions - It's comments like this that make me want to grab a metal bucket, put it on my head, and start hitting myself with a mallet. To delete and existing /opt or /home requires explicit user intervention for this to happen. It doesn't happen by itself. You have to a.) click the mount point, b.) click the minus (-) button to indicate you want it removed, and c.) the installer produces a dialog indicating it's going to be deleted, along with a cancel button, and d.) the installer produces a summary of changes at the very end of the Manual Partitioning process THAT FUCKING HIGHLIGHTS THIS SHIT IN RED LETTERS indicating it will be deleted. So what is it *EXACTLY* that you're experiencing? And what is it *EXACTLY* you think you should experience instead? If you can't do that, please stop offering opinions about how you need to minimize risk due to the installer. This the compsci equivalent of hypochondria... which have nearly 20 years of accumulated digital clutter! And you have backups right? Because by definition it's not important unless you have backups. Points taken :) :o and apologies where needed. But maybe the problem is that not many people install/reinstall/fedup often enough to get familiar with it. So I simply make sure I avoid the problem. The thought of risking mucking it up after being bitten just once (maybe in the distant past) still makes me do an Upgrade the way I do by a reinstall but requiring my own /home and other partitions. Because these are on separate disks these filesystems are kept securely offline till the install (upgrade) is complete - then I manually add them - anyone else wanting to be really sure they have control of an upgrade would be sensible in doing the same thing! I am sure the existing anaconda will allow me to do this - but it irritates me that some people think it shouldn't - and like I say I don't upgrade often enough to be confident and sure. The thought of trying to back up 300GB using hmmm! a dvd drive! persuades me I'd rather live with a RAID 1 setup and occasionally take one of the mirrors off and replace it with a new disk - preserving the old disk mirror as my backup. So I'm afraid I want to preserve my filesystems (and their partitioning) and NO - I don't have backups! - and you wont persuade me to take any either - I would spend all day doing backups - and please don't give me another lecture on the subject - I have set up bacula on a large network blah! and done script systems using dump/restore and found that its a full time job which introduces new risks that pretty well counter the benefits - Unless you are talking about enterprise systems! Neurotic I might be, but that's the way I do an upgrade because I don't trust the installer - yum upgrade - fedup or whatever its next incarnation might be! Andy -- users mailing list users@lists.fedoraproject.org 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
Re: F21 partitioning circus
On 02/23/2015 01:48 PM, Chris Murphy wrote: Anaconda's supported layouts (usage of device types, and creating volume associated with mountpoints) is not any different among the various medias available. There's a slight misunderstanding here. Having two versions of anaconda, one for Live media and one for a full install DVD would double the workload and complexity so it has to be written to fit into the Live image even though there are things that would be nice to have in the larger version. And yes, I know that you can install GParted into the Live environment if needed; I was thinking that if there was room to include it, it might be possible for anaconda to call it if and when needed so that it would fit into the installation seamlessly. I'm not sure if it's worth the trouble or not, but I did think that the possibility was worth mentioning. -- users mailing list users@lists.fedoraproject.org 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
Re: F21 partitioning circus
On 23.02.2015, Pete Travis wrote: Because that's that I want isn't a good way to ask for someone else's time. I didn't ask for someone else's time, but for an explanation why there is a custom mode which indeed isn't custom . I do not want somebody to implement something which fits my special needs. Now, I've learned that custom in fact doesn't mean custom.. -- users mailing list users@lists.fedoraproject.org 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
Re: F21 partitioning circus
On Mon, Feb 23, 2015 at 2:54 PM, Andrew R Paterson andy.pater...@ntlworld.com wrote: But maybe the problem is that not many people install/reinstall/fedup often enough to get familiar with it. Nor should they. Therein lies a huge reason for why I think the scope is just too extreme when they either have to become familiar with its idiosyncrasies, or read a bunch of documentation. fedup should get better, although I don't know the time frame. One of the ideas floated is to make major upgrades show up in Gnome-Software just like offline updates do which already leverages systemd. And eventually I'd like to see the default installations be a handful of use cases but under neath it all it's a stateless installation that permits easy resets, and atomic updates. So I simply make sure I avoid the problem. The thought of risking mucking it up after being bitten just once (maybe in the distant past) still makes me do an Upgrade the way I do by a reinstall but requiring my own /home and other partitions. Because these are on separate disks these filesystems are kept securely offline till the install (upgrade) is complete - then I manually add them - anyone else wanting to be really sure they have control of an upgrade would be sensible in doing the same thing! No they should test this and try to break it and if they can break it file a bug so that we can all trust the installer, rather than suggesting ways to avoid making things better and more trustworthy. I am sure the existing anaconda will allow me to do this - but it irritates me that some people think it shouldn't - and like I say I don't upgrade often enough to be confident and sure. I've done dozens of /home reuse. It even includes /home on a Btrfs subvolume, which is on a volume that / is also going to be created which normally mandates a reformat which might suggest /home gets obliterated, but the installer instead creates a new subvolume for / instead of reformatting, and reuses the existing /home. So I'm afraid I want to preserve my filesystems (and their partitioning) and NO - I don't have backups! - and you wont persuade me to take any either - I would spend all day doing backups - and please don't give me another lecture on the subject - I have set up bacula on a large network blah! You hate your data. You want it gone. You're just unwilling to do it directly yourself, so instead you're being passive aggressive with it. and done script systems using dump/restore and found that its a full time job which introduces new risks that pretty well counter the benefits - Unless you are talking about enterprise systems! OK add the lack of a really good backup and restore to the list of consequences everyone suffers from, by everyone demanding their obscure layout be supported. These arbitrary layouts, rather than standardization, is impossible to restore correctly without human intervention or very expensive (development knowledge and time and testing) backup restore software. Neurotic I might be, but that's the way I do an upgrade because I don't trust the installer - yum upgrade - fedup or whatever its next incarnation might be! Well as yet not neurotic enough if you aren't doing backups, yet so worried about your /home data you think it's going to be the installer that nukes it. -- Chris Murphy -- users mailing list users@lists.fedoraproject.org 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
Re: F21 partitioning circus
On Monday 23 February 2015 15:45:26 Chris Murphy wrote: On Mon, Feb 23, 2015 at 2:54 PM, Andrew R Paterson andy.pater...@ntlworld.com wrote: But maybe the problem is that not many people install/reinstall/fedup often enough to get familiar with it. Nor should they. Therein lies a huge reason for why I think the scope is just too extreme when they either have to become familiar with its idiosyncrasies, or read a bunch of documentation. fedup should get better, although I don't know the time frame. One of the ideas floated is to make major upgrades show up in Gnome-Software just like offline updates do which already leverages systemd. And eventually I'd like to see the default installations be a handful of use cases but under neath it all it's a stateless installation that permits easy resets, and atomic updates. So I simply make sure I avoid the problem. The thought of risking mucking it up after being bitten just once (maybe in the distant past) still makes me do an Upgrade the way I do by a reinstall but requiring my own /home and other partitions. Because these are on separate disks these filesystems are kept securely offline till the install (upgrade) is complete - then I manually add them - anyone else wanting to be really sure they have control of an upgrade would be sensible in doing the same thing! No they should test this and try to break it and if they can break it file a bug so that we can all trust the installer, rather than suggesting ways to avoid making things better and more trustworthy. I am sure the existing anaconda will allow me to do this - but it irritates me that some people think it shouldn't - and like I say I don't upgrade often enough to be confident and sure. I've done dozens of /home reuse. It even includes /home on a Btrfs subvolume, which is on a volume that / is also going to be created which normally mandates a reformat which might suggest /home gets obliterated, but the installer instead creates a new subvolume for / instead of reformatting, and reuses the existing /home. So I'm afraid I want to preserve my filesystems (and their partitioning) and NO - I don't have backups! - and you wont persuade me to take any either - I would spend all day doing backups - and please don't give me another lecture on the subject - I have set up bacula on a large network blah! You hate your data. You want it gone. You're just unwilling to do it directly yourself, so instead you're being passive aggressive with it. and done script systems using dump/restore and found that its a full time job which introduces new risks that pretty well counter the benefits - Unless you are talking about enterprise systems! OK add the lack of a really good backup and restore to the list of consequences everyone suffers from, by everyone demanding their obscure layout be supported. These arbitrary layouts, rather than standardization, is impossible to restore correctly without human intervention or very expensive (development knowledge and time and testing) backup restore software. Neurotic I might be, but that's the way I do an upgrade because I don't trust the installer - yum upgrade - fedup or whatever its next incarnation might be! Well as yet not neurotic enough if you aren't doing backups, yet so worried about your /home data you think it's going to be the installer that nukes it. Hang on there Chris, (new thread really) why do you think using a mirror as a backup is a bad idea? After all its a bit like a database checkpoint. What is the benefit of a full backup against simply taking a mirror offline and replacing it with a new mirror and resyncing - without I might add taking my system down? As opposed to taking your box offline, and doing a level 0 backup to another disk - you end up with a serial backup which must be parsed - I end up with a filesystem that I can mount? To me this is one of the benefits of mirroring - I can mount one of my old detached mirrors somewhere else and get at my old data. That's aside from the lower risk of losing the data in the first place. I don't particularily need to archive data - just preserve it. I think you will find this idea is becoming more common these days. So please give some good reasons for archive (backup) better than checkpoint (detached mirror)?? Andy -- users mailing list users@lists.fedoraproject.org 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
Re: F21 partitioning circus
On 02/23/2015 01:54 PM, Andrew R Paterson wrote: Neurotic I might be, but that's the way I do an upgrade because I don't trust the installer - yum upgrade - fedup or whatever its next incarnation might be! Just as a side-note: I've never had fedup fail me on my laptop or work correctly on my desktop. As soon as my hardware guy can come out here (It's a long trip, I'm on a limited income and paying for his gas is a bit of a stretch right now.) and replace my power supply, I'll be migrating off of F 19 to F 20, using upgrade-fedora and see if that works any better. I'd have done it already, but I really don't like the idea of having the box shut itself down or reboot in the middle of an upgrade. Will report back when I can with the results. -- users mailing list users@lists.fedoraproject.org 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
Re: F21 partitioning circus
On Mon, Feb 23, 2015 at 2:16 PM, Joe Zeff j...@zeff.us wrote: On 02/23/2015 12:56 PM, Chris Murphy wrote: If you really want partitions, why aren't you doing this with gparted then? What's the problem with that workflow? Why do you need it integrated in Anaconda? One of the constraints on what anaconda can do comes from space limitations, especially on the Live media. (One of the reasons why I've always used the full install DVD.) Anaconda's supported layouts (usage of device types, and creating volume associated with mountpoints) is not any different among the various medias available. Manual Partitioning behaves exactly the same. What will be new in Fedora 22 is, guided partitioning will offer different defaults for the different products. So you'll need to be more specific what limitations you're talking about. Is there room to include GParted and have anaconda call it if needed? From live media, just yum/dnf install gparted and now it's in the live environment. You can partition however you want. There's no easy way for Anaconda and Gparted to be used at the same time, in effect Anaconda has a lock on the storage stack and changing it from underneath it will cause it to become unstable; and engineering it to work differently so that it can deal with Gparted changing things underneath it is asking for a huge amount of logistical work to make it stable. As in, not worth the effort. But you can certainly use Gparted first, complete the task of creating the layout you want, and then quit Gparted and launch the installer. Realize that Gparted is partition oriented only, it's not adept at any of the LVM or LVM thinp stuff, or Btrfs. At the moment I'm not seeing blivet-gui in Fedora repos but you have a functioning FireFox on live media so you can still retrieve it that way. It supports all the things the installer does but with a Gparted like interface. -- Chris Murphy -- users mailing list users@lists.fedoraproject.org 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
Re: F21 partitioning circus
On 02/23/2015 01:52 PM, Chris Murphy wrote: So if there's no bug citation I'm considering this in the realm of conjecture. It's a unicorn. I'd prefer to call it a Black Swan: something that shouldn't ever happen, but not quite as impossible as we think. -- users mailing list users@lists.fedoraproject.org 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
Re: F21 partitioning circus
I have to say I find this disucssion interesting I have spent what amounts to a small fortune (for me!) making sure that when I upgrade from one version of LINUX to another (initially slackware but so far fedora 9 - 20) that I can minimise the risk of (anaconda or whatever the current installer might be) deciding in its wisdom whilst doing the partitioning that it thinks best, blowing away my /opt and/home partitions - which have nearly 20 years of accumulated digital clutter! To that end I have my home and multimedia filesystems on a separate raid pair of disks and my /boot root on a separate system disk. All my disks are in removable caddies! When I upgrade I usually buy a new system disk install onto it and only when its stable do I go about connecting and mounting my home and multimedia filesystems. If the upgrade isn't to my liking - I can reload the old system disk. I used to have a hellish time due to things like the size of /boot being too small and problems like that associated with having to repartition. So I just point out that been there - done that and I came to the conclusion that anaconda just has a holier than thou attitude and the only way round it is to do what I have done. But as I say its an expensive option. Andy On Sunday 22 February 2015 16:05:57 Chris Murphy wrote: On Sun, Feb 22, 2015 at 3:19 PM, Joe Zeff j...@zeff.us wrote: On 02/22/2015 02:01 PM, Chris Murphy wrote: If you, who seems to care about such things so much, won't do that work, then why should anyone else do it? I haven't done any programming worth mentioning since the late '80s and never learned python. My impression was that back then, anaconda used whatever standard partitioning programs were available, rather than rolling their own. ? They use parted, mdadm, lvm, grub-install/mkconfig, and mkfs. But that's not where the bulk of the code is. I don't know python either, but I can still make out some sense of the complexity involved by looking at anaconda, python-blivet (that's the bulk of the storage code), and even the new python-bytesize package will give you some idea of the complexity involved in all of this. Any GUI installer is not just some dumb wrapper for existing tools, more so with Anaconda that has a huge amount of logic wrapped into it. It's worth skimming the code. 443 lines just for iSCSI (which depends on a bunch of other code, this is just the iscsi portion), devicefactory is nearly 2000 lines. The installer is substituting/emulating a human being's logic. https://github.com/rhinstaller/anaconda https://github.com/rhinstaller/blivet Let me ask you this: could I, if needed, boot from a Live Gpartd CD/USB, set up and format things the way I wanted and then use those existing partitions when installing Fedora? Yes. Matthew already mentioned that. The exception is that the installer insists on root fs being formatted by the installer. I understand why this is considered safer, but at the same time I think a fsck check (no repairing) passes without errors should permit that volume to be used. This turns into a problem if you have say, hardware raid and you need to use custom mkfs options to tune the file system to the raid. With software raid, mkfs becomes aware of the underlying geometry. This isn't guaranteed with many types of hardware raid, so custom options are needed, and we have no way to do that in the installer so instead you'll have to do this post-install with fstab mount options. -- users mailing list users@lists.fedoraproject.org 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
Re: F21 partitioning circus
On Monday 23 February 2015 09:10:24 Andrew R Paterson wrote: I have to say I find this disucssion interesting I have spent what amounts to a small fortune (for me!) making sure that when I upgrade from one version of LINUX to another (initially slackware but so far fedora 9 - 20) that I can minimise the risk of (anaconda or whatever the current installer might be) deciding in its wisdom whilst doing the partitioning that it thinks best, blowing away my /opt and/home partitions - which have nearly 20 years of accumulated digital clutter! To that end I have my home and multimedia filesystems on a separate raid pair of disks and my /boot root on a separate system disk. All my disks are in removable caddies! When I upgrade I usually buy a new system disk install onto it and only when its stable do I go about connecting and mounting my home and multimedia filesystems. If the upgrade isn't to my liking - I can reload the old system disk. I used to have a hellish time due to things like the size of /boot being too small and problems like that associated with having to repartition. So I just point out that been there - done that and I came to the conclusion that anaconda just has a holier than thou attitude and the only way round it is to do what I have done. But as I say its an expensive option. Andy On Sunday 22 February 2015 16:05:57 Chris Murphy wrote: On Sun, Feb 22, 2015 at 3:19 PM, Joe Zeff j...@zeff.us wrote: On 02/22/2015 02:01 PM, Chris Murphy wrote: If you, who seems to care about such things so much, won't do that work, then why should anyone else do it? I haven't done any programming worth mentioning since the late '80s and never learned python. My impression was that back then, anaconda used whatever standard partitioning programs were available, rather than rolling their own. ? They use parted, mdadm, lvm, grub-install/mkconfig, and mkfs. But that's not where the bulk of the code is. I don't know python either, but I can still make out some sense of the complexity involved by looking at anaconda, python-blivet (that's the bulk of the storage code), and even the new python-bytesize package will give you some idea of the complexity involved in all of this. Any GUI installer is not just some dumb wrapper for existing tools, more so with Anaconda that has a huge amount of logic wrapped into it. It's worth skimming the code. 443 lines just for iSCSI (which depends on a bunch of other code, this is just the iscsi portion), devicefactory is nearly 2000 lines. The installer is substituting/emulating a human being's logic. https://github.com/rhinstaller/anaconda https://github.com/rhinstaller/blivet Let me ask you this: could I, if needed, boot from a Live Gpartd CD/USB, set up and format things the way I wanted and then use those existing partitions when installing Fedora? Yes. Matthew already mentioned that. The exception is that the installer insists on root fs being formatted by the installer. I understand why this is considered safer, but at the same time I think a fsck check (no repairing) passes without errors should permit that volume to be used. This turns into a problem if you have say, hardware raid and you need to use custom mkfs options to tune the file system to the raid. With software raid, mkfs becomes aware of the underlying geometry. This isn't guaranteed with many types of hardware raid, so custom options are needed, and we have no way to do that in the installer so instead you'll have to do this post-install with fstab mount options. my apologies for top-posting. Andy -- users mailing list users@lists.fedoraproject.org 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
Re: F21 partitioning circus
On 02/23/2015 05:36 PM, Chris Murphy wrote: Right. And I'm still waiting to hear, what ought to be much easier than answering your questions, examples of what layout the installer won't let them create; or won't use once precreated elsewhere. Fair enough. For the record, I don't think it does bcache devices yet. ;-) From a process and resource POV, though, it just seems like it would be nice for anaconda development to be able to step off the hampster wheel of chasing the lastest and greatest device types (and combinations thereof). If the bits are there in Fedora to support a particular storage setup, let dracut, udev, etc. do their thing and just use the block devices they set up. -- Ian Pilcher arequip...@gmail.com I grew up before Mark Zuckerberg invented friendship -- users mailing list users@lists.fedoraproject.org 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
Re: F21 partitioning circus
On 02/23/2015 01:13 PM, jd1008 wrote: I think it does make sense, because users would like to custom partition the drive(s) and live with that partitioning scheme for many years. So, all such options should be made available. A responder to this thread mentioned that there should be an expert mode in Anaconda where the user accepts all the consequences of her/his choice(s). What is the benefit of having anaconda worry about *creating* these partitioning schemes (for lack of a better term)? Wouldn't it be better to ask people to use the regular tools in a live media environment for anything other than a very basic scheme and save anaconda dev time for ensuring that it is able to *use* as many pre- existing schemes as possible as reliably as possible? -- Ian Pilcher arequip...@gmail.com I grew up before Mark Zuckerberg invented friendship -- users mailing list users@lists.fedoraproject.org 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
Re: F21 partitioning circus
On Mon, Feb 23, 2015 at 4:23 PM, Ian Pilcher arequip...@gmail.com wrote: What is the benefit of having anaconda worry about *creating* these partitioning schemes (for lack of a better term)? Wouldn't it be better to ask people to use the regular tools in a live media environment for anything other than a very basic scheme and save anaconda dev time for ensuring that it is able to *use* as many pre- existing schemes as possible as reliably as possible? Right. And I'm still waiting to hear, what ought to be much easier than answering your questions, examples of what layout the installer won't let them create; or won't use once precreated elsewhere. -- Chris Murphy -- users mailing list users@lists.fedoraproject.org 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
Re: F21 partitioning circus
On Sun, Feb 22, 2015 at 08:08:14PM +0100, Heinz Diehl wrote: There's no actual advantage of primary partitions on linux anyway. Extlinux depends on primary partitions, but GRUB doesn't. The thing is that I no longer have the freedom to do what I want when installing (unless I've missed something crucial). If there is an advantage in using other partition schemes is another question. They're actually quite related. The installer UI is intended* to present meaningful decisions, and make those choices easier and more straightforward by not necessarily offering all the possibilities when the result is effectively the same. You can, however, pre-partition your system and use those partitions, or use kickstart to partition very flexibly. * how well it succeeds _is_ another question. -- Matthew Miller mat...@fedoraproject.org Fedora Project Leader -- users mailing list users@lists.fedoraproject.org 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
F21 partitioning circus
Hi, booted from the F21 XFCE spin and tried to create four primary partitions: /boot/efi swap / /home However, this seems to be impossible. When choosing the last of the four partitions, the F21 installer automatically generates a /dev/sda5, within an extended partition (sda4). No matter what I try, it always ends up this way. WTF?? Is there something I missed? Thanks, Heinz. -- users mailing list users@lists.fedoraproject.org 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
Re: F21 partitioning circus
On 22.02.2015, Chris Murphy wrote: There's no actual advantage of primary partitions on linux anyway. Extlinux depends on primary partitions, but GRUB doesn't. The thing is that I no longer have the freedom to do what I want when installing (unless I've missed something crucial). If there is an advantage in using other partition schemes is another question. -- users mailing list users@lists.fedoraproject.org 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
Re: F21 partitioning circus
On Sun, 22 Feb 2015 14:13:28 -0500 Matthew Miller wrote: * how well it succeeds _is_ another question. I gave up on installing on physical hardware as soon as the new anaconda first showed up. I don't trust a single thing the hopelessly obnoxious interface shows me and have no idea what on earth it is going to do to my disks. (Being forced to click the Done button way before I'm done was the straw that broke the camel's back :-). Instead, I install in a virtual machine where anaconda is free to trash the virtual disks in any way it sees fit, then I copy the virtual images to partitions I create myself adjust the grub.cfg and fstab files and boot using the configfile option of a stand alone grub instance. -- users mailing list users@lists.fedoraproject.org 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
Re: F21 partitioning circus
On Sun, Feb 22, 2015 at 11:12 AM, Heinz Diehl htd...@fritha.org wrote: Is there something I missed? There is only one difference in functionality between 3 primaries + 1 extended, vs 4 primaries: the former can have more partitions added without deleting any partitions. There's no actual advantage of primary partitions on linux anyway. Extlinux depends on primary partitions, but GRUB doesn't. -- Chris Murphy -- users mailing list users@lists.fedoraproject.org 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
Re: F21 partitioning circus
On 02/22/2015 12:25 PM, Tom Horsley wrote: On Sun, 22 Feb 2015 14:13:28 -0500 Matthew Miller wrote: * how well it succeeds _is_ another question. I gave up on installing on physical hardware as soon as the new anaconda first showed up. I don't trust a single thing the hopelessly obnoxious interface shows me and have no idea what on earth it is going to do to my disks. (Being forced to click the Done button way before I'm done was the straw that broke the camel's back :-). Instead, I install in a virtual machine where anaconda is free to trash the virtual disks in any way it sees fit, then I copy the virtual images to partitions I create myself adjust the grub.cfg and fstab files and boot using the configfile option of a stand alone grub instance. Seems like grub UI could be improved by providing clearer explanations for each choice and it's consequences. -- users mailing list users@lists.fedoraproject.org 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
Re: F21 partitioning circus
On 02/22/2015 12:25 PM, Tom Horsley wrote: On Sun, 22 Feb 2015 14:13:28 -0500 Matthew Miller wrote: * how well it succeeds _is_ another question. I gave up on installing on physical hardware as soon as the new anaconda first showed up. I don't trust a single thing the hopelessly obnoxious interface shows me and have no idea what on earth it is going to do to my disks. (Being forced to click the Done button way before I'm done was the straw that broke the camel's back :-). Instead, I install in a virtual machine where anaconda is free to trash the virtual disks in any way it sees fit, then I copy the virtual images to partitions I create myself adjust the grub.cfg and fstab files and boot using the configfile option of a stand alone grub instance. Seems like the Anaconda UI could provide much clearer explanations of available choices, and the consequenes of those choices (i.e. their impact on the drives/partitions that are VISIBLE to Anaconda). -- users mailing list users@lists.fedoraproject.org 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
Re: F21 partitioning circus
On 02/22/2015 12:08 PM, Heinz Diehl wrote: On 22.02.2015, Chris Murphy wrote: There's no actual advantage of primary partitions on linux anyway. Extlinux depends on primary partitions, but GRUB doesn't. The thing is that I no longer have the freedom to do what I want when installing (unless I've missed something crucial). If there is an advantage in using other partition schemes is another question. I have a 2TB drive formatted as a single MBR partition. I guess that's just about the limit of and MBR partition size. But what if the sector size is made to be programmable and is increased at formatting time to values like 2K bytes or even 128K bytes, and then let the FS decide how to use those sectors? -- users mailing list users@lists.fedoraproject.org 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
Re: F21 partitioning circus
On 22.02.2015, Matthew Miller wrote: The installer UI is intended* to present meaningful decisions, and make those choices easier and more straightforward.. When I chose custom partitioning, I actually chose to do things on my own, which however won't be the case. That's weird. There's the possibility for all the others to chose automatic partitioning, which will take care of those who doesn't want to fiddle around. A custom mode should be.. custom. ..by not necessarily offering all the possibilities when the result is effectively the same. If the result is effectively the same is something the installer or those who implement the different partitioning checks/options actually can't know. There are some corner cases where this would be impossible, and I thought this is what a custom partitioning is for. Btw: I noticed that not only the partitioning scheme gets altered by using an extended partition where I didn't want it to have, but also the partition numbers itself get replaced while configuring. -- users mailing list users@lists.fedoraproject.org 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
Re: F21 partitioning circus
On 22.02.2015, Tom Horsley wrote: Instead, I install in a virtual machine where anaconda is free to trash the virtual disks in any way it sees fit, then I copy the virtual images to partitions I create myself adjust the grub.cfg and fstab files and boot using the configfile option of a stand alone grub instance. That's pretty sick :-) (but I now see *perfectly* why you're doing that). -- users mailing list users@lists.fedoraproject.org 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
Re: F21 partitioning circus
On Sun, Feb 22, 2015 at 12:29 PM, jd1008 jd1...@gmail.com wrote: Seems like grub UI could be improved by providing clearer explanations for each choice and it's consequences. What GRUB UI? Haha. GRUB upstream is not targeted at the mortal user. It's basically a buffet of tools for distributions, who then patch the hell out of it, making them all sufficiently different they end up with all sorts of incompatibilities. GRUB upstream will invariably say you need to build their upstream version any time you report a bug, because they have no idea to what degree distro specific patches have altered upstream intended behavior. That's how awful the cooperation and agreement really is, on this very basic plumbing aspect of Linux OS's. This is a How many ways can we boot a computer? project, is what it comes down to. So when the goal is finding myriad ways of achieving the exact same goal, there are no resources for things like consolidated agreement, let alone polish. I think the work just on patching GRUB exceeds the work required for each distro to have their own simple bootloader if they were to have the discipline in their GUI installers to reduce the layouts and hence ways to boot the system. It's a big circular let's make more work for ourselves extravaganza. But then, funny enough, if it weren't for that, we maybe wouldn't have projects like Fedora Atomic which is really quite cool. -- Chris Murphy -- users mailing list users@lists.fedoraproject.org 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
Re: F21 partitioning circus
On Sun, Feb 22, 2015 at 3:19 PM, Joe Zeff j...@zeff.us wrote: On 02/22/2015 02:01 PM, Chris Murphy wrote: If you, who seems to care about such things so much, won't do that work, then why should anyone else do it? I haven't done any programming worth mentioning since the late '80s and never learned python. My impression was that back then, anaconda used whatever standard partitioning programs were available, rather than rolling their own. ? They use parted, mdadm, lvm, grub-install/mkconfig, and mkfs. But that's not where the bulk of the code is. I don't know python either, but I can still make out some sense of the complexity involved by looking at anaconda, python-blivet (that's the bulk of the storage code), and even the new python-bytesize package will give you some idea of the complexity involved in all of this. Any GUI installer is not just some dumb wrapper for existing tools, more so with Anaconda that has a huge amount of logic wrapped into it. It's worth skimming the code. 443 lines just for iSCSI (which depends on a bunch of other code, this is just the iscsi portion), devicefactory is nearly 2000 lines. The installer is substituting/emulating a human being's logic. https://github.com/rhinstaller/anaconda https://github.com/rhinstaller/blivet Let me ask you this: could I, if needed, boot from a Live Gpartd CD/USB, set up and format things the way I wanted and then use those existing partitions when installing Fedora? Yes. Matthew already mentioned that. The exception is that the installer insists on root fs being formatted by the installer. I understand why this is considered safer, but at the same time I think a fsck check (no repairing) passes without errors should permit that volume to be used. This turns into a problem if you have say, hardware raid and you need to use custom mkfs options to tune the file system to the raid. With software raid, mkfs becomes aware of the underlying geometry. This isn't guaranteed with many types of hardware raid, so custom options are needed, and we have no way to do that in the installer so instead you'll have to do this post-install with fstab mount options. -- Chris Murphy -- users mailing list users@lists.fedoraproject.org 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
Re: F21 partitioning circus
On 02/22/2015 03:05 PM, Chris Murphy wrote: Yes. Matthew already mentioned that. The exception is that the installer insists on root fs being formatted by the installer. I see no problem with that. If I'm doing a clean install, that's what I want anyway, and with today's machines, the amount of time it takes isn't enough to worry about. (Or, of course, I can create the partitions ahead of time, leaving them unformatted, and let anaconda do the formatting.) -- users mailing list users@lists.fedoraproject.org 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
Re: F21 partitioning circus
On 22.02.2015, Chris Murphy wrote: Windows, OS X installers have maybe 2-3 total layouts between them. And their installers are completely, totally, bullet proof. They don't ever crash, or ask the user to create required partitions, they always succeed in their penultimate goal which is to install a bootable OS. Frankly, the vast majority of the users of those operating systems aren't even capable of installing them by themselves. And there are essentially zero user complaints about these installers. There's nothing at all to even complain about because they don't do anything except meet their primary requirement. Not even their developers or testers even complain about the installer, it does one thing successfully. I see. Maintainability preceeds flexibility by reducing/eliminating user influence at the same time. While it took over 100 years in medicine to reduce i know what's best for you and moving towards shared decision making, it goes the other way 'round here. Fortunately, there are still distributions which let the user have the desired influence. -- users mailing list users@lists.fedoraproject.org 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
Re: F21 partitioning circus
On Sun, Feb 22, 2015 at 11:39:10PM +0100, Heinz Diehl wrote: I see. Maintainability preceeds flexibility by reducing/eliminating user influence at the same time. While it took over 100 years in medicine to reduce i know what's best for you and moving towards shared decision making, it goes the other way 'round here. Fortunately, there are still distributions which let the user have the desired influence. In my opinion your comments here are a little over-strong, but, yes, fundamentally, Fedora isn't meant to be a hacker/tinkerer distribution at the user level. (If you want to get involved as a hacker/tinkerer at the _development_ level, that's awesome and please do, but that's a different thing.) User control of content and devices is part of the Fedora vision*, but as we look towards having the biggest impact in the world to bring that to everyone, there are bigger battles to fight: open and free software vs. proprietary, hardware enablement with open source drivers, ease of making derivative works, transparency and traceability of builds, etc. Those are the areas we need to fight. Chris already explained (very eloquently) the reasons the installer's partitioning interface works as it does, and the goal certainly _isn't_ to reduce influence. It's to allow users to worry about things that matter by _just doing the right thing_ where it doesn't matter for 99.99%. If you're in that 0.01, or for whatever other reason you want it to be different, there are good mechanisms in Fedora for doing basically whatever. (Seriously, consider kickstart, even at small scale.) And if that's not enough, sure, it's a big world and there _are_ awesome hacker-focused distributions. * I mean, literally: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Vision_statement -- Matthew Miller mat...@fedoraproject.org Fedora Project Leader -- users mailing list users@lists.fedoraproject.org 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
Re: F21 partitioning circus
On Sun, Feb 22, 2015 at 12:56 PM, Heinz Diehl htd...@fritha.org wrote: On 22.02.2015, Matthew Miller wrote: The installer UI is intended* to present meaningful decisions, and make those choices easier and more straightforward.. When I chose custom partitioning, I actually chose to do things on my own, No, you really aren't. From the outset of using a GUI installer, you're asking for some amount of guidance. See Arch's install method, which has no installer at all, for doing things on your own. GUI installers vary only on the scope of how much guidance you get, there is always some guidance. As I've said, Anaconda doesn't even directly let you create partitions. You're creating mount points and volumes. The partitions are entirely incidental, and done for you behind the scenes. Any notion you have of it being about partitioning is an illusion. And that illusion is perpetrated by the installer itself by calling it Manual Partitioning. which however won't be the case. That's weird. There's the possibility for all the others to chose automatic partitioning, which will take care of those who doesn't want to fiddle around. A custom mode should be.. custom. I completely disagree. More custom, more flexibility, in a GUI installer, is a trap. It directly leads to unnecessary design work, coding work, maintenance work, and bugs. If it were up to me, which it obviously isn't, I'd strip out Manual Partitioning entirely, and roll some of that function into blivet-gui. And give the installer different use case options, each of which are variations on automatic partitioning. And I'd refine that, and fix those bugs, leaving the user out of it as much as possible. That's how you get polish in an installer. Case in point: BIOSBoot and EFI System partitions. The user must create these things in Manual Partitioning and that's hopelessly flawed from all perspectives except the nutty let's give the user some sense of power and control that they don't actually have nor should they. Past installer never enabled the user to create MBR gaps. There's absolutely no good reason this installer should present boot loader partitions to users now. It requires ridiculous amounts of useless knowledge. ..by not necessarily offering all the possibilities when the result is effectively the same. If the result is effectively the same is something the installer or those who implement the different partitioning checks/options actually can't know. There are some corner cases where this would be impossible, and I thought this is what a custom partitioning is for. Nope. Manual Partitioning is really just for tweaking a guided layout. It's less guidance. Btw: I noticed that not only the partitioning scheme gets altered by using an extended partition where I didn't want it to have, but also the partition numbers itself get replaced while configuring. Like I keep saying, any notion the installer gives you the ability to create partitions is an illusion. If there's a case for partitions being in a certain order, for everyone, then that should be filed as a bug/RFE so that the installer always does the best thing by default. -- Chris Murphy -- users mailing list users@lists.fedoraproject.org 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
Re: F21 partitioning circus
On 02/22/2015 01:09 PM, Chris Murphy wrote: I completely disagree. More custom, more flexibility, in a GUI installer, is a trap. It directly leads to unnecessary design work, coding work, maintenance work, and bugs. I can remember when custom partitioning let you do whatever you wanted, even if it was wrong. That's probably not a Good Thing for the average user, but it would be nice if there were an Expert Mode that turned off the sanity checks but made you confirm that you knew what you were doing and accepted the risk that you might create a layout that can't work. (Making sure that if you have a /boot it's big enough and that you haven't specified separate partitions for directories that have to be on the root partition would be the only exceptions.) That way, those of us with decades of experience and highly unusual requirements can do what we need without forcing the average user to work things out without a safety net. -- users mailing list users@lists.fedoraproject.org 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
Re: F21 partitioning circus
On 02/22/2015 02:01 PM, Chris Murphy wrote: If you, who seems to care about such things so much, won't do that work, then why should anyone else do it? I haven't done any programming worth mentioning since the late '80s and never learned python. My impression was that back then, anaconda used whatever standard partitioning programs were available, rather than rolling their own. Let me ask you this: could I, if needed, boot from a Live Gpartd CD/USB, set up and format things the way I wanted and then use those existing partitions when installing Fedora? If so, that's all I'd need because what I want, mostly, is a way to use my existing layout because it's grown up piece by piece, and it's easier for me to use it than to back everything up, reformat and try to shoehorn what I have into whatever layout anaconda wants to stick me with. -- users mailing list users@lists.fedoraproject.org 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
Re: F21 partitioning circus
On Sun, Feb 22, 2015 at 3:39 PM, Heinz Diehl htd...@fritha.org wrote: On 22.02.2015, Chris Murphy wrote: Windows, OS X installers have maybe 2-3 total layouts between them. And their installers are completely, totally, bullet proof. They don't ever crash, or ask the user to create required partitions, they always succeed in their penultimate goal which is to install a bootable OS. Frankly, the vast majority of the users of those operating systems aren't even capable of installing them by themselves. The users don't know these things because they don't have to know them, not the other way around. There's no benefit in them knowing such things it's not intrinsically valuable knowledge for the majority. It's sufficient that a scant minority know such things. Look at even Android and cyanogen. Look at the reinvention of all OS's for mobile devices and how much simpler things are when constraining choices. Chromebooks are in that same category. Simple. Just works. They picked a layout and stuck with it. And that's not to say the layout of my cyanogen phone is exactly simple, it uses GPT partition scheme, and has 28 partitions. (Of course that's not by my choice, I had no say.) And there are essentially zero user complaints about these installers. There's nothing at all to even complain about because they don't do anything except meet their primary requirement. Not even their developers or testers even complain about the installer, it does one thing successfully. I see. Maintainability preceeds flexibility by reducing/eliminating user influence at the same time. While it took over 100 years in medicine to reduce i know what's best for you and moving towards shared decision making, it goes the other way 'round here. - No, it's called picking battles. And what you're suggesting is a false dichotomy. Shared decision making actually turns into I want partitioning with a cherry on top, you over there, go plant me a cherry tree. - No you can do it your way by using either blivet-gui, or gparted, or CLI tools in advance if you want. - Anaconda's Manual Partitioning is still one of the single most capable installer's of the lot, even if it doesn't support your specific use case. Fortunately, there are still distributions which let the user have the desired influence. Right. Because the problem Linux on the desktop has is it's 1000 knobs aren't enough and users need more choice. The inhibiting factor has been, this whole time, all these years, is that users really want more f'n confusion in their life. So the other day I used Yast to do an installation. Of course they're now using Btrfs by default. But it also allows me to check a box to use LVM and I thought oh that's almost certainly a bad idea, let's see what happens And what I got was 18 separate LV's, formatted Btrfs, instead of one Btrfs volume and 18 subvolumes (and even the 18 subvolumes is completely pathological). So yeah, less choice should be the default in any GUI ecosystem, not more choice. And besides, why in the world should so many resources go into creating advanced storage stacks only for OS installation? Why shouldn't I have such a tool for creating a big bad ass RAID with a bunch of LV's for each department? Why should I only find this in an installer, which arguably doesn't even need that? It's not it's primary use case. And it seems there's some agreement on that front, which is how the core storage portition of Anaconda got split out into its own package, python-blivet. And now there's blivet-gui which uses it, with a gparted-like UI. And OpenLMI uses python-blivet. And maybe one day soon, Cockpit on Fedora Server, will use it rather than everyone having to reinvent this wheel. -- Chris Murphy -- users mailing list users@lists.fedoraproject.org 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
Re: F21 partitioning circus
On 02/22/2015 01:11 PM, Chris Murphy wrote: On Sun, Feb 22, 2015 at 12:19 PM, jd1008 jd1...@gmail.com wrote: I have a 2TB drive formatted as a single MBR partition. I guess that's just about the limit of and MBR partition size. But what if the sector size is made to be programmable and is increased at formatting time to values like 2K bytes or even 128K bytes, and then let the FS decide how to use those sectors? Physical and logical sector size is fixed by the drive (in firmware). There's no changing it. I'm skeptical whether we'll ever see 4Kn (4096 byte logical and physical sector) drives being understood by (legacy) BIOS computers. The BIOS asks the drive for LBA 0 and expects to get 512 bytes, yet with 4Kn drives, LBA 0 is 4096 bytes, so instantly you have failure. Actually, it's possible the confusion even happens at POST before BIOS asks the drive for the first sector. As for fs block sizes, right now on Linux the block size can't be larger than page size, which on x86 is 4096 bytes. Btrfs gets around this somewhat with a 4KB blocksize, while defaulting to 16KB nodesize. I'm not sure of the upper limit, I've tested 64KB nodesizes. Interesting. What about FreeBSD's UFS (sometimes aka FFS - fast fs)? Does it not also allow for FS blocksize to be than page size? -- users mailing list users@lists.fedoraproject.org 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
Re: F21 partitioning circus
On 02/22/2015 01:47 PM, Chris Murphy wrote: On Sun, Feb 22, 2015 at 12:29 PM, jd1008 jd1...@gmail.com wrote: Seems like grub UI could be improved by providing clearer explanations for each choice and it's consequences. What GRUB UI? Haha. GRUB upstream is not targeted at the mortal user. It's basically a buffet of tools for distributions, who then patch the hell out of it, making them all sufficiently different they end up with all sorts of incompatibilities. GRUB upstream will invariably say you need to build their upstream version any time you report a bug, because they have no idea to what degree distro specific patches have altered upstream intended behavior. That's how awful the cooperation and agreement really is, on this very basic plumbing aspect of Linux OS's. This is a How many ways can we boot a computer? project, is what it comes down to. So when the goal is finding myriad ways of achieving the exact same goal, there are no resources for things like consolidated agreement, let alone polish. I think the work just on patching GRUB exceeds the work required for each distro to have their own simple bootloader if they were to have the discipline in their GUI installers to reduce the layouts and hence ways to boot the system. It's a big circular let's make more work for ourselves extravaganza. But then, funny enough, if it weren't for that, we maybe wouldn't have projects like Fedora Atomic which is really quite cool. Sorry, I did not mean to open some other unintentional thread. I meant to say Anaconda, and Grub slipped out of my KB :) :) -- users mailing list users@lists.fedoraproject.org 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
Re: F21 partitioning circus
On Sun, Feb 22, 2015 at 2:25 PM, Joe Zeff j...@zeff.us wrote: On 02/22/2015 01:09 PM, Chris Murphy wrote: I completely disagree. More custom, more flexibility, in a GUI installer, is a trap. It directly leads to unnecessary design work, coding work, maintenance work, and bugs. I can remember when custom partitioning let you do whatever you wanted, even if it was wrong. That's probably not a Good Thing for the average user, but it would be nice if there were an Expert Mode that turned off the sanity checks but made you confirm that you knew what you were doing and accepted the risk that you might create a layout that can't work. No, because with very few exceptions, users file bugs and complain bitterly when their crazy layout doesn't work or blows up the installer. It's not worth it. (Making sure that if you have a /boot it's big enough and that you haven't specified separate partitions for directories that have to be on the root partition would be the only exceptions.) That way, those of us with decades of experience and highly unusual requirements can do what we need without forcing the average user to work things out without a safety net. Well you're not going to convince me that highly unusual requirements is a valid reason for someone else to do the monumental amount of work to get a GUI installer to do arbitrary things for what amounts to total edge cases. -- Chris Murphy -- users mailing list users@lists.fedoraproject.org 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
Re: F21 partitioning circus
On 02/22/2015 01:37 PM, Chris Murphy wrote: Well you're not going to convince me that highly unusual requirements is a valid reason for someone else to do the monumental amount of work to get a GUI installer to do arbitrary things for what amounts to total edge cases. And yet, I used to be able to do such things, so the code must have existed. And, as far as filing bugs when they fsck things up, the response is, You were using Expert Mode, and accepted the risks. NOTABUG. -- users mailing list users@lists.fedoraproject.org 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
Re: F21 partitioning circus
On Sun, Feb 22, 2015 at 2:44 PM, Joe Zeff j...@zeff.us wrote: On 02/22/2015 01:37 PM, Chris Murphy wrote: Well you're not going to convince me that highly unusual requirements is a valid reason for someone else to do the monumental amount of work to get a GUI installer to do arbitrary things for what amounts to total edge cases. And yet, I used to be able to do such things, so the code must have existed. Give an example, and I'll take a stab at supplying an answer. But chances are Anaconda considered such capability simply not worth development resources, even if they didn't consider it a treacherously bad idea. And, as far as filing bugs when they fsck things up, the response is, You were using Expert Mode, and accepted the risks. NOTABUG. No the response is go build your own GUI installer. The code you're talking about has to be maintained by someone, it doesn't just sit there and keep on working as everything around it changes. Basically that code broke or needed too much work to hook it up to the new user interface, so it was dropped. And even if that's not the case, the code you're referring to is python2 code, so now that anacond-blivet is moving to python3 someone would have to do that migration work. If you, who seems to care about such things so much, won't do that work, then why should anyone else do it? What you're talking about might be in-scope for blivet-gui. It definitely sounds out of scope for a GUI OS installer. Windows, OS X installers have maybe 2-3 total layouts between them. And their installers are completely, totally, bullet proof. They don't ever crash, or ask the user to create required partitions, they always succeed in their penultimate goal which is to install a bootable OS. And there are essentially zero user complaints about these installers. There's nothing at all to even complain about because they don't do anything except meet their primary requirement. Not even their developers or testers even complain about the installer, it does one thing successfully. -- Chris Murphy -- users mailing list users@lists.fedoraproject.org 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
Re: F21 partitioning circus
On Sun, Feb 22, 2015 at 12:08 PM, Heinz Diehl htd...@fritha.org wrote: On 22.02.2015, Chris Murphy wrote: There's no actual advantage of primary partitions on linux anyway. Extlinux depends on primary partitions, but GRUB doesn't. The thing is that I no longer have the freedom to do what I want when installing (unless I've missed something crucial). The whole point of a GUI installer is to take away superfluous or dangerous options, not to empower users to do what they want, however they want. Every use case must be justified, and do what I want is not self-justifying. This comes up between sysadmins and users, engineers and consumers, all the time. The consumer says I want X and you should get to X by doing it this way. Umm no, you want something approximately X or maybe something not even X at all, but the process by which consumers get in the vicinity of X is not at all legitimate user domain - that's for design and engineering teams to sort out. X in this case is I want an OS installation that works and the installer will do that if you let it. Linux OS GUI installers are all just variations on rearranging the deck chairs from CLI tools. They present the same sorts of things, just in a GUI, and still burdens the user with a lot of nonsense. What Anaconda did with new UI is break with that tradition, and emphasize final results, not the nutty esoteric details of how to get there. Where it still frustrates is how it doesn't convey this worldview very well to the user. That's a difficult problem to solve, the result is the user still thinks they're supposed to be able to manipulate partitions. We still call this Manual Partitioning after all, so it's really wrongly named for a UI that almost totally deemphasizes partitions. If there is an advantage in using other partition schemes is another question. Nope, it's directly related to installer design and behavior. Does it make sense for the installer to make it possible, let alone easy, for the user to unwittingly wedge themselves into corner? No. -- Chris Murphy -- users mailing list users@lists.fedoraproject.org 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
Re: F21 partitioning circus
On Sun, Feb 22, 2015 at 1:21 PM, jd1008 jd1...@gmail.com wrote: Interesting. What about FreeBSD's UFS (sometimes aka FFS - fast fs)? Does it not also allow for FS blocksize to be than page size? The block size needing to be at or smaller than the page size is a linux kernel limitation. So if FreeBSD allows it, that's probably why, they aren't using linux. Windows NTFS also has a configurable block size above 4KB, as does OS X's HFS+. Different kernels. -- Chris Murphy -- users mailing list users@lists.fedoraproject.org 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
Re: F21 partitioning circus
On Sun, Feb 22, 2015 at 12:19 PM, jd1008 jd1...@gmail.com wrote: I have a 2TB drive formatted as a single MBR partition. I guess that's just about the limit of and MBR partition size. But what if the sector size is made to be programmable and is increased at formatting time to values like 2K bytes or even 128K bytes, and then let the FS decide how to use those sectors? Physical and logical sector size is fixed by the drive (in firmware). There's no changing it. I'm skeptical whether we'll ever see 4Kn (4096 byte logical and physical sector) drives being understood by (legacy) BIOS computers. The BIOS asks the drive for LBA 0 and expects to get 512 bytes, yet with 4Kn drives, LBA 0 is 4096 bytes, so instantly you have failure. Actually, it's possible the confusion even happens at POST before BIOS asks the drive for the first sector. As for fs block sizes, right now on Linux the block size can't be larger than page size, which on x86 is 4096 bytes. Btrfs gets around this somewhat with a 4KB blocksize, while defaulting to 16KB nodesize. I'm not sure of the upper limit, I've tested 64KB nodesizes. -- Chris Murphy -- users mailing list users@lists.fedoraproject.org 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
Re: F21 partitioning circus
On 02/23/2015 12:43 AM, Chris Murphy wrote: Look at even Android and cyanogen. Look at the reinvention of all OS's for mobile devices and how much simpler things are when constraining choices. Chromebooks are in that same category. Simple. Just works. They picked a layout and stuck with it. These OSes address the use-case of a completely non-knowledge able user to install an OS as single OS on some piece of comparatively non-complex HW. Not that this use-case would not exist with Linux, but this is very different from typical Fedora and Linux use-cases, which comprises multibooting and co-existence with other OSes, a wide variety of HW and a wide variety of configurations. Ralf -- users mailing list users@lists.fedoraproject.org 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
