On 10/18/2011 11:58 AM, Chris Lumens wrote:
The amount of work you're describing here is huge, and the number of
people who would benefit from such a setup is very small. I'd guess
that for whatever scenario you can imagine, another scenario can be
imagined that would not be able to be handled.
I disagree with just about everything you've said above.
RPM has a few, not really all that many, safeguards for not overwriting
config files, files of different types, etc. The change I'm proposing is
small and relatively contained -- add a mode to RPM where all of those
safeguards are turned off. Allow RPM and anaconda to create everything
that want to create as if it's a brand-new installation, and any time
anything is in the way (and there really are not that many such cases,
so it's not "huge" at all), just blow it away.
I don't want to start haggling over details of example after example,
but just to give you one example to make this a more concrete
discussion. Let's say you do an x86-64 installation. You then later go
and do an i386 installation reusing the / from before. You now have two
sets of the libraries laying around, for different architectures. What
happens?
The x86_64 libraries are irrelevant to RPM and Anaconda and ignored by
them during the installation. Similarly, they are ignored /after/ the
installation, because nothing in the config files and such that were
installed references them. They're cruft, just like all kinds of other
cruft that accumulates over time on a disk. In the scenario you
described, the person who chose to overwrite rather than reformatting /
chose to allow that cruft to remain, and it's his/her choice to make.
Not to mention that making design decisions based on rare corner cases
like this one is not a good way to design software.
Clearly, using an already-formatted / is /not/ a rare corner case.
Several people have spoken up here about what they use it for and why,
and their uses cases are reasonable and necessary.
In both of these scenarios, it's not that there's some config file
confusing anaconda. It's files owned by RPMs that would not be
overwritten by installing something else, and those files will cause
problems. How do you even determine what's "unexpected" or "of the
wrong type"?
Anything. Anything at all. You're doing a fresh install. So install
everything, and if anything gets in the way, blow it away. It's much
simpler than you're making it out to be.
jik
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