On Sun, 2015-02-22 at 15:01 -0700, Chris Murphy wrote:
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.
While I don't find it hard to believe that Windows developers won't
complain. After all, just about all Windows users do is install Windows
as a new install, or over the top of a previous one, with no intention
of doing anything like dual-boot. Shoe-horn it in, that's all they care
about. These days, it's all single-partition, or act like it's
single-partition with a hidden boot/recovery partition that the user
doesn't know about.
I find it harder to believe that users don't complain about the Windows
installer. I've certainly seen it fuck up, and I can't be the only one.
It was a gamble to see whether an install over the top could manage to
keep existing data, never mind settings. And trying to get it to
install to the right drive in a two-drive PC was nothing but trial and
error (one drive for Windows, a second drive for video on a non-linear
editing suite).
I, also, am rather incredulous of how difficult it is to have the Linux
installer simply do what the user tells it to do, instead of
second-guessing them and denying them of what they want to do. If I
select custom partition, and edit partitions myself, type of options, I
expect it to have a GUI that does what I tell it to do.
In the past, before the live DVD install era, I'd boot the install disc
and wait for to pause on some screen, then CTRL + ALT + FUNCTION-KEY to
another terminal, and fdisc my hard drive, and go back to the installer
and have it use my pre-defined partitions. Even further back, I'd
select the options to check partitions for faults, rather than get a
nasty surprise a few months in when the drive reaches a certain amount
of fullness and comes across a bad section.
I don't know what's really so hard about giving us a simple GUI hard
drive partitioner somewhere in the install routine. Using the command
line tool is a pain (e.g. you cannot see any details about the rest of
the drive while you're working on making a partition), and there are
other standalone GUI partitioning tools that exist.
Leave the so-called automatic smart partitioning to those people who
choose the full-automatic option.
--
tim@localhost ~]$ uname -rsvp
Linux 3.18.7-100.fc20.i686 #1 SMP Wed Feb 11 21:16:53 UTC 2015 i686
All mail to my mailbox is automatically deleted, there is no point trying
to privately email me, I will only read messages posted to the public lists.
George Orwell's '1984' was supposed to be a warning against tyranny, not
a set of instructions for supposedly democratic governments.