F21 partitioning circus

[Chris Murphy]

On Sun, Feb 22, 2015 at 11:23 PM, Ralf Corsepius <rc040203 at freenet.de> wrote:
> In my experience, anaconda is the #1 point, many people (ordinary users and
> power users) are complaining about when getting in contact with Fedora and
> is the #1 reason why they are shying away from installing Fedora (When
> talking to non-Fedora users, the first question very often is "Is the
> installer still the crap it used to be?".)

This is what happens when the installer offers a gigantic smörgåsbord
before a total rewrite: everyone is used to their specialty dish in
the buffet and will get totally pissed off when their stinky dish no
one else will touch isn't offered in the revamp. Unsurprising.

The ordinary user use case should be bullet proof. I argued
strenuously for Manual Partitioning features to work or be stripped
from the UI. I think it's bad for GUIs to offer broken things, because
it makes them untrustworthy, and we can't have that.

I think that's been proven to be correct, even though hindsight is
20/20 too, the reality is too much was bitten off, much more than
could be chewed, and more than Anaconda had help with from these power
users who wanted all of these (highly questionable) use cases
supported as if it's easy.

Guy: CHEF! Make me Peking Duck to go, you have 5 minutes!

Chef: Umm, well I can't make Peking Duck in 5 minutes, it takes an hour.

Guy: Idiot!

It's really just noise. In many ways I think the power user was
excessively coddled during the rewrite. The scope should have been
significantly narrowed, the main uses cases made bullet proof and then
refined, before any Manual Partitioning should even have been
included. I filed over 100 bugs on newUI a lot of which had to do with
Manual Partitioning and quite honestly I wish I could get that time
back.


> To "newbies" the GUI is "cryptical" and "non-selfexplatory", while to
> "power-users" the GUI doesn't provide the features catering their demands
> and clumsy to use.

Ok well, unless the power users are filing coherent bugs and/or
contributing code, their demands are edge cases that probably
shouldn't be supported.

The newbies always have legitimate complaints. They're completely
innocent in all of this, and that's where I'd have put resources.

And in terms of prioritizing, I think i18n needed more resources,
accessibility needs more resources, and I'm sure we can find some
other enhancements to the installer well before more Manual
Partitioning enhancements happen.


Me:
>> That's a difficult problem to solve,
>> the result is the user still thinks they're supposed to be able to
>> manipulate partitions.
>
> IMO, this is a distorted view. People want to understand what the installer
> does and to have control over it. The current GUI does not do so and instead
> applies some magic which people have learnt does not do what they want.

People who aren't filing bugs, who aren't contributing code, want
what? If the use case is viable, and helps a large percent of users,
then I think this could be done. But please feel free to be specific,
rather than generally casting the installer with a broad brush that
suggests the GUI doesn't at all do what anyone wants ever.

-- 
Chris Murphy