/ must be on a partition or LV that will be formatted. Reusing an existing / is not allowed.

[Jonathan Kamens]

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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