Release criteria proposal: partitioning (alpha and beta)

[Adam Williamson]

Hey, folks. So I'm sorry this is a bit late, but I've been working on
the proposed partitioning criteria for F18, and here's what I've got:

For Alpha, I think the proposal from the earlier 'untitled' thread still
stands up pretty well:

* The installer must be able to complete an installation using automatic
partitioning to any sufficiently large target disk, whether unformatted,
empty, or containing any kind of existing data

I'd also like to add this:

* The installer must allow the user to select which of the disks
connected to the system will be affected by the installation process.
Disks not selected as installation targets must not be affected by the
installation process in any way

Seems self-explanatory.

For Final, I think our current rather catch-all criterion probably
stands up OK:

* The installer must be able to create and install to any workable
partition layout using any file system offered in a default installer
configuration, LVM, software, hardware or BIOS RAID, or combination of
the above

So that leaves Beta. Here's what I've come up with for Beta so far:

* The installer must be able to complete an installation using automatic
partitioning to a disk with sufficient empty space, using the empty
space and leaving the existing partition table and data untouched

* The installer's custom partitioning mode must be capable of the
following:
** Creating and assigning mount points to partitions of any specified
size using most commonly-used filesystem types
** Creating encrypted partitions
** Rejecting obviously invalid operations without crashing

I tried to cover the non-custom case we need to work at Beta that we
don't need at Alpha - non-destructively using existing free space. Note
I _intentionally_ didn't require resizing to work, we've always
considered resizing to be a 'best effort' thing, not guaranteed. The
second thing is just a laundry list of 'things that probably ought to
work in custom partitioning at Beta' drawn from experience. It also
happens to reflect the Beta test cases in the matrix quite well, now I
look at it, though I didn't refer to them when drawing it up.

There's probably stuff I haven't thought of here, I'm sure people can
think of improvements. I'll throw an item on the agenda for Monday for
this, but please do post any improvements you can think of. thanks!
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | identi.ca: adamwfedora
http://www.happyassassin.net