[Base] Fedora Base Design Working Group (2014-02-21) meeting minutes and logs

[Adam Williamson]

On Fri, 2014-02-21 at 16:38 -0500, John.Florian at dart.biz wrote:

> > With the best of intentions, we'd gone from a reluctant exception to the
> > 'no choice' design to a dropdown which included two very different
> > complex choices: LVM and btrfs. So now the installer path which was
> > originally supposed to be minimal-choice, very robust and testable and
> > fixable, had become rather a lot more complex.
> 
> Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.

I don't think that precept applies very well to this area.

The problem is that there are - and this is probably *literal*, not a
rhetorical flourish - millions of Special Little Use Cases like yours
(the one below, snipped for brevity) out there. *You* want it to be easy
to skip /home. *She* wants it to be easy to resize a Slackware install.
*That guy* wants to use btrfs. *My cat* likes RAID. It is becoming very,
very clear that we just cannot undertake to support them all and
guarantee that they are all going to work in a release. It's just _too
much work_. Everyone agrees that it would be nice if we could, but then
everyone agrees that it'd be nice if I had a solid gold toilet. Some
nice things just don't happen. We do not have the resources to be in the
business of writing the world's biggest disk configuration tool and
guaranteeing that it'll never go wrong, which isn't *quite* what we're
currently trying to do, but it's not far from it.

It's worth trying some other installers out, just to reset your
expectations. Have you seen the level of flexibility you get from
Ubuntu's interactive installer? Windows'? OS X's?

>   I 
> appreciate your QA angle here.  Every condition in a code path leads to 
> exponential growth in testing.

And development. This isn't just a QA problem. We do not have the
development resources to commit to all this stuff working reliably every
six months.

>   However, when I have my admin hat on, I 
> want flexibility.  I love LVM for that reason.  However, if I'm setting up 
> simple VMs whose backend storage resides in a LV, I have no need or desire 
> for LVM within the VM.

Does it hurt you to get it, though? I do my VM installs with LVs. I
don't really need them. But nothing explodes, and two hours later I
forget all about it. In the end it's just bits. As long as the bits are
where they need to be when things need to read them, who *gives* a
monkey's tail?

I did recognize that it would be tough sledding to get back to zero
choice, and if you ask me to crystal ball it, we might have to wind up
back at 'plain partitions or LVM'. But that's still a substantial
improvement on where we are right now.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | XMPP: adamw AT happyassassin . net
http://www.happyassassin.net