F21 partitioning circus

[Chris Murphy]

On Sun, Feb 22, 2015 at 12:08 PM, Heinz Diehl <htd+ml at 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