F21 partitioning circus

[Chris Murphy]

On Sun, Feb 22, 2015 at 12:56 PM, Heinz Diehl <htd+ml at fritha.org> wrote:
> On 22.02.2015, Matthew Miller wrote:
>
>> The installer UI is intended* to present meaningful decisions,
>> and make those choices easier and more straightforward..
>
> When I chose "custom partitioning", I actually chose to do things on my own,

No, you really aren't. From the outset of using a GUI installer,
you're asking for some amount of guidance. See Arch's install method,
which has no installer at all, for "doing things on your own." GUI
installers vary only on the scope of how much guidance you get, there
is always some guidance.

As I've said, Anaconda doesn't even directly let you create
partitions. You're creating mount points and volumes. The partitions
are entirely incidental, and done for you behind the scenes. Any
notion you have of it being about partitioning is an illusion. And
that illusion is perpetrated by the installer itself by calling it
Manual Partitioning.

> which however won't be the case. That's weird. There's the possibility for all
> the others to chose automatic partitioning, which will take care of those who
> doesn't want to fiddle around. A custom mode should be.. custom.

I completely disagree. More custom, more flexibility, in a GUI
installer, is a trap. It directly leads to unnecessary design work,
coding work, maintenance work, and bugs.

If it were up to me, which it obviously isn't, I'd strip out Manual
Partitioning entirely, and roll some of that function into blivet-gui.
And give the installer different use case options, each of which are
variations on automatic partitioning. And I'd refine that, and fix
those bugs, leaving the user out of it as much as possible. That's how
you get polish in an installer.

Case in point: BIOSBoot and EFI System partitions. The user must
create these things in Manual Partitioning and that's hopelessly
flawed from all perspectives except the nutty let's give the user some
sense of power and control that they don't actually have nor should
they. Past installer never enabled the user to create MBR gaps.
There's absolutely no good reason this installer should present boot
loader partitions to users now. It requires ridiculous amounts of
useless knowledge.

>
>> ..by not necessarily offering all the possibilities when
>> the result is effectively the same.
>
> If the result is effectively the same is something the installer or those who
> implement the different partitioning checks/options actually can't know. There
> are some corner cases where this would be impossible, and I thought this is
> what a "custom partitioning" is for.

Nope. Manual Partitioning is really just for tweaking a guided layout.
It's less guidance.


> Btw: I noticed that not only the partitioning scheme gets altered by using an
> extended partition where I didn't want it to have, but also the partition
> numbers itself get replaced while configuring.

Like I keep saying, any notion the installer gives you the ability to
create partitions is an illusion. If there's a case for partitions
being in a certain order, for everyone, then that should be filed as a
bug/RFE so that the installer always does the best thing by default.

-- 
Chris Murphy