On Monday 23 February 2015 14:03:17 Chris Murphy wrote:
On Mon, Feb 23, 2015 at 2:10 AM, Andrew R Paterson
andy.paterson@ntlworld.com wrote:
I have to say I find this disucssion interesting.... I have spent what amounts to a small fortune (for me!) making sure that when I upgrade from one version of LINUX to another (initially slackware but so far fedora 9 - 20) that I can minimise the risk of (anaconda or whatever the current installer might be) deciding in its wisdom whilst doing the partitioning that it thinks best, blowing away my /opt and/home partitions -
It's comments like this that make me want to grab a metal bucket, put it on my head, and start hitting myself with a mallet.
To delete and existing /opt or /home requires explicit user intervention for this to happen. It doesn't happen by itself. You have to a.) click the mount point, b.) click the minus (-) button to indicate you want it removed, and c.) the installer produces a dialog indicating it's going to be deleted, along with a cancel button, and d.) the installer produces a summary of changes at the very end of the Manual Partitioning process THAT FUCKING HIGHLIGHTS THIS SHIT IN RED LETTERS indicating it will be deleted.
So what is it *EXACTLY* that you're experiencing? And what is it *EXACTLY* you think you should experience instead? If you can't do that, please stop offering opinions about how you need to minimize risk due to the installer. This the compsci equivalent of hypochondria...
which have nearly 20 years of accumulated digital clutter!
And you have backups right? Because by definition it's not important unless you have backups.
Points taken :) :o and apologies where needed. But maybe the problem is that not many people install/reinstall/fedup often enough to get familiar with it. So I simply make sure I avoid the problem. The thought of risking "mucking it up" after being bitten just once (maybe in the distant past) still makes me do an "Upgrade" the way I do by a reinstall but requiring my own /home and other "partitions". Because these are on separate disks these filesystems are kept securely offline till the install (upgrade) is complete - then I manually add them - anyone else wanting to be really sure they have control of an "upgrade" would be sensible in doing the same thing! I am sure the existing anaconda will allow me to do this - but it irritates me that some people think it shouldn't - and like I say I don't upgrade often enough to be confident and sure. The thought of trying to back up 300GB using hmmm! a dvd drive! persuades me I'd rather live with a RAID 1 setup and occasionally take one of the mirrors off and replace it with a new disk - preserving the old disk mirror as my "backup". So I'm afraid I want to preserve my filesystems (and their partitioning) and NO - I don't have backups! - and you wont persuade me to take any either - I would spend all day doing backups - and please don't give me another lecture on the subject - I have set up bacula on a large network blah! and done script systems using dump/restore and found that its a full time job which introduces new risks that pretty well counter the benefits - Unless you are talking about enterprise systems! Neurotic I might be, but that's the way I do an "upgrade" because I don't trust the installer - yum upgrade - fedup or whatever its next incarnation might be! Andy