Fedora 15, new and exciting plans

[Richard W.M. Jones]

On Mon, Nov 15, 2010 at 08:53:03AM +0000, "Jóhann B. Guðmundsson" wrote:
> On 11/15/2010 02:41 AM, Matthew Garrett wrote:
> >LVM's a fantasically useful tool in a wide range of cases, but I don't
> >think that in the*typical*  laptop/desktop install any of that
> >functionality ever gets used.
> 
> That's the essence of what's being discussed here
> laptop/desktop/workstation installs default to ext4 and experienced
> users/sysadmins those that generally know what lvm is with all it's
> bells and whistles and want to use it will choose it during
> installation.
> 
> Those that claim that novice end users have no problem using LVM I
> want them to perform just this very simple case of two person
> sharing what ever data between themselves could be family photo
> music video and what not.
> 
> Partition an external connected HD that you got laying around with LVM.
> 
> Hand that drive to the novice end user running GNU/Linux on
> laptop/desktop/workstation ( if he's not you can just insert a live
> cd and boot from it ) and ask him to copy a single file to that
> drive no more no less.
> 
> Take note on how many obstacle are in the users way from performing
> this simple yet commonly used test case.
> 
> Repeate process this time with ext4 only for comparison.
> 
> After performing this simple test case and you have gathered the
> necessary data revisit the topic of how easy it is for the novice
> end user to use LVM and if he will ever use what ever tools we
> provide him with to take advantage of all the features LVM brings
> and if it makes sense to default to it.

This is a silly straw-man.  No one[1] formats external HDs with
anything other than MS-DOS FAT.  Fedora changing the default for the
main hard disk will not make any difference to this case of your
contrarian user giving away LVM-formatted USB drives.

Rich.

[1] for a sufficiently small value

-- 
Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones
Read my programming blog: http://rwmj.wordpress.com
Fedora now supports 80 OCaml packages (the OPEN alternative to F#)
http://cocan.org/getting_started_with_ocaml_on_red_hat_and_fedora