anaconda verbosity

[Nathanael D. Noblet]

Hello,

   So on Friday I used the netinstall to upgrade my baremetal F15 system 
to F17. Went well and I'm enjoying F17 so far. However I noticed that 
anaconda is um... too quiet?  When performing the usrmove there was 
nothing telling me that anything was going on. There was another stage 
that took *forever* where I couldn't tell what my computer was doing, 
very little HD activity, no UI etc. I ended up stracing anaconda and 
noticed it was downloading the rpm .hdr files. There were a few times 
(the upgrade took about 3 hours on my quad core i7 PC) where I was 
wondering if it was frozen. I'm wondering if anaconda could be slightly 
more verbose? Even just letting me know what it is doing as opposed to 
the vague "Initializing or Starting setup..." I can't remember the exact 
messages. Alternatively, sometimes the anaconda logs were useful (like 
in the case of usrmove). Perhaps at the bottom of the screen some more 
detailed messages for those that care could be 'hidden' and expanded 
with an arrow or something.

   Perhaps the level of detail is sufficient and I'm the only one who 
wants to know what is happening?

   Thoughts?
-- 
Nathanael d. Noblet
t 403.875.4613

[Przemek Klosowski]

On 04/12/2012 11:53 AM, Nathanael D. Noblet wrote:
>      So on Friday I used the netinstall to upgrade my baremetal F15
> system
>  to F17. Went well and I'm enjoying F17 so far. However I noticed that
>  anaconda is um... too quiet? 
[...]
>  very little HD activity, no UI etc. I ended up stracing anaconda and
>  noticed it was downloading the rpm .hdr files. There were a few times
>  (the upgrade took about 3 hours on my quad core i7 PC) where I was
>  wondering if it was frozen. I'm wondering if anaconda could be slightly
>  more verbose? 
[...]
>      Perhaps the level of detail is sufficient and I'm the only
> one who
>  wants to know what is happening? 
You're absolutely right, and it's not just anaconda---it's very useful 
to be able to figure out what the system is doing. It has huge 
performance implications---if we want our systems to be more responsive, 
we have to be looking for performance bottlenecks, and application 
status and tracing are the right tools.

Unfortunately, tracing has negative security implications and there's an 
ongoing SELinux discussion about disabling tracing by default, 
systemwide. I don't like that idea, even though it's fairly easy to 
override.

[Nathanael D. Noblet]

On 04/12/2012 11:35 AM, Przemek Klosowski wrote:
>  On 04/12/2012 11:53 AM, Nathanael D. Noblet wrote:
> > So on Friday I used the netinstall to upgrade my baremetal F15 system
> > to F17. Went well and I'm enjoying F17 so far. However I noticed that
> > anaconda is um... too quiet?
>  [...]
> > very little HD activity, no UI etc. I ended up stracing anaconda and
> > noticed it was downloading the rpm .hdr files. There were a few times
> > (the upgrade took about 3 hours on my quad core i7 PC) where I was
> > wondering if it was frozen. I'm wondering if anaconda could be slightly
> > more verbose?
>  [...]
> > Perhaps the level of detail is sufficient and I'm the only one who
> > wants to know what is happening?
>
>  You're absolutely right, and it's not just anaconda---it's very useful
>  to be able to figure out what the system is doing. It has huge
>  performance implications---if we want our systems to be more responsive,
>  we have to be looking for performance bottlenecks, and application
>  status and tracing are the right tools.
>
>  Unfortunately, tracing has negative security implications and there's an
>  ongoing SELinux discussion about disabling tracing by default,
>  systemwide. I don't like that idea, even though it's fairly easy to
>  override. 
Yeah, I'm not even talking about tracing. Just increasing the verbosity. 
I can't recall at what stage anaconda performed the usrmove. However 
there was absolutely no indication what it was doing. I think it was 
around the user /date /time or some other thing. And it sat there doing 
nothing, not progressbar etc... The same when it downloaded the headers. 
Even if it just said "Downloading rpm headers..." better yet if it did 
similar to the installation phase where it gives you package by package. 
There are a number of situations where there is a progress bar but the 
text and what it is doing is vague and so I don't really know what's 
happening.

-- 
Nathanael d. Noblet
t 403.875.4613

[Brian C. Lane]

On Thu, Apr 12, 2012 at 09:53:17AM -0600, Nathanael D. Noblet wrote:
>  
>    Perhaps the level of detail is sufficient and I'm the only one who
>  wants to know what is happening? 
Actually anaconda is quite verbose, at least in the logfiles. If you
look in /tmp/ you will find a number of logfiles that are updated by
anaconda.

convertfs shouldn't take long to run, and since it is a script provided
by dracut we have no way of knowing what is happening internally.

I can take a look at the dialogs we show during an upgrade, maybe we are
skipping something that normally shows in a new install.

-- 
Brian C. Lane | Anaconda Team | IRC: bcl #anaconda | Port Orchard, WA (PST8PDT)