On Fri, 2006-04-28 at 03:14 +0100, David Woodhouse wrote:
Of course LVM has its benefits. I'm certainly not suggesting that
we
should remove support for it from the installer. But what percentage of
people actually _use_ the potential that it offers? I certainly don't.
I think this is a pretty bogus argument. People don't use the features
it gives them -- namely the ability to add space on another disk and
have it be part of the same filesystem -- mostly because we provide no
serious UI for doing so.
What percentage of Fedora users even know that it's there?
Again, same problem.
Most single-disk workstation installs don't seem to benefit from
the
fact that LVM gets enabled.
True -- but those that aren't laptops do actually have the potential to
benefit from it, if our tools provided for that user experience.
> Your argument of fragility is a strawman, just because you deem
LVM
> the spawn of evil doesn't mean that this breakage is not a bug that
> should be fixed.
[meta removed]
I certainly don't consider LVM to be 'the spawn of evil'
-- I just think
it's a poor _default_ because it makes the boot process more fragile,
and I can't imagine that _many_ people actually get any benefit from it
at all (unless of course they actually know and care about it, and would
have enabled it anyway regardless of the default. So they don't benefit
from the fact that it's the default.)
I don't think, unless you're tracking rawhide, that it actually makes
booting more fragile if you've only got one disk. Ironically, the
people whom you somewhat accurately point out don't benefit are also the
people least likely to see any additional risk.
I say somewhat accurately on purpose though -- there is a significant
advantage to doing the same thing by default for most users. I can see
the argument for not doing LVM by default on laptops, but honestly I
think we gain *so* much more because of the testing this leads to that
it's well worth it.
The risks may be relatively small, but they are real. Anything which
introduces extra dependencies in the boot process is something which we
really should be very careful about. I've seen a _lot_ of machines
render themselves unbootable in my time, for a lot of reasons. :)
This _is_ mostly a strawman. Quantify the risks, please, instead of
just waving your hands.
We should make the boot process as robust as possible. Of _course_
there's a real bug which needs to be (and in fact has been) fixed in
LVM. These things happen. We _know_ these things happen. And we should
make sure our system copes with that as well as possible.
Yeah, but you'd only see it if you're tracking rawhide. Woop-de-do,
rawhide will break sometimes.
--
Peter