F21 partitioning circus

[Chris Murphy]

On Sun, Feb 22, 2015 at 2:44 PM, Joe Zeff <joe at zeff.us> wrote:
> On 02/22/2015 01:37 PM, Chris Murphy wrote:
>>
>> Well you're not going to convince me that highly unusual requirements
>> is a valid reason for someone else to do the monumental amount of work
>> to get a GUI installer to do arbitrary things for what amounts to
>> total edge cases.
>
>
> And yet, I used to be able to do such things, so the code must have existed.

Give an example, and I'll take a stab at supplying an answer. But
chances are Anaconda considered such capability simply not worth
development resources, even if they didn't consider it a treacherously
bad idea.

> And, as far as filing bugs when they fsck things up, the response is, "You
> were using Expert Mode, and accepted the risks.  NOTABUG."

No the response is "go build your own GUI installer." The code you're
talking about has to be maintained by someone, it doesn't just sit
there and keep on working as everything around it changes. Basically
that code broke or needed too much work to hook it up to the new user
interface, so it was dropped. And even if that's not the case, the
code you're referring to is python2 code, so now that anacond-blivet
is moving to python3 someone would have to do that migration work. If
you, who seems to care about such things so much, won't do that work,
then why should anyone else do it?

What you're talking about might be in-scope for blivet-gui. It
definitely sounds out of scope for a GUI OS installer.

Windows, OS X installers have maybe 2-3 total layouts between them.
And their installers are completely, totally, bullet proof. They don't
ever crash, or ask the user to create required partitions, they always
succeed in their penultimate goal which is to install a bootable OS.
And there are essentially zero user complaints about these installers.
There's nothing at all to even complain about because they don't do
anything except meet their primary requirement. Not even their
developers or testers even complain about the installer, it does one
thing successfully.


-- 
Chris Murphy