F18 final release criterion #9, Windows

[Adam Williamson]

On Thu, 2012-12-13 at 13:18 -0700, Chris Murphy wrote:
> It currently reads:
> 
> > The installer must be able to install into free space alongside an
> existing clean single-partition Windows installation and either
> install a bootloader which can boot into the Windows installation, or
> leave the Windows bootloader untouched and working.
> > 
> 
> "single-partition" requirement is unreasonable. The default Windows 7
> installation is two partitions, a 105MB NTFS boot partition, and the
> rest of the disk space is consumed by the 2nd partition. The
> overwhelming majority of Windows installations are like this. And many
> I've seen from OEM are three partition with the manufacturer's restore
> utilities on the 3rd.

We already discussed this, it probably needs rewording, but the intent
is just a 'typical' Windows install - i.e. not one with a bunch of data
drives.

> I think there needs to be a "do no harm" clause. In the real case
> where 98% of NTFS free space is sucked away from Windows for Fedora
> during autopart, even if Windows were still bootable (which in 2 for 2
> attempts in my case it is not) it is a seriously flawed default. I'd
> suggest no more than 25% of Windows free space be dedicated to Fedora
> in autopart. In all of the mock ups from months ago, this was
> configurable, but I'm finding it to not be configurable in anaconda
> 18.37.2-1.

'autopart' does not shrink anything. If you're going to shrink a
partition the only way is interactively, either via the 'guided'
free-up-space dialog, or custom part.

So I think the big change in behaviour here - which somehow I hadn't
quite grokked before - is that, in the non-custom ('guided') workflow in
F18, you don't get any opportunity to decide how much shrinking to do.

In oldUI, if you use the non-custom shrink workflow, you get a dialog
with a dropdown for selecting the partition you want to shrink, and a
number entry box for how big you want it to wind up.

In newUI, all you can do is pick a partition and click 'Shrink', at
which point anaconda decides for you that it should be shrunk just as
much as anaconda thinks is practically possible.

This is actually a big problem, because that's probably the thing you're
least likely to want to do. If you're shrinking an existing partition
it's because you're going to keep on using it, and if you're going to
keep on using it, it seems unlikely that you want it to be full.

I know we're pretty late here, but we may need to do some lobbying of
the anaconda team to do something about this. The current non-custom
shrink option seems almost worse than not having one at all.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | identi.ca: adamwfedora
http://www.happyassassin.net