requirement to (re)format volumes when installing

[Adam Williamson]

On Mon, 2012-12-10 at 14:43 -0700, Chris Murphy wrote:

> 1. To properly install to hardware RAID 0, 10, 5, 6, I effectively
> have to learn kickstart. I can properly create the volumes myself,
> informing the file system at make time what the chunk and stripe width
> are. The anaconda requirement to reformat in this case is
> unreasonable.

Um. What? Formatting the resulting 'disks' does not affect your
configuration of the underlying RAID, as I understand it. The disks are
logical representations of the RAID arrays you created. I don't see why
it's a problem to format a partition that is backed by a hardware RAID
array.

> 3. The policy complicates the UI/UX of the Installation Destination
> spoke. Both basic and advanced users can benefit from a simplified
> point and shoot UI: select a pre-formatted volume, click an install
> button. Two clicks and installation commences. This is  how 95% of the
> world's desktop OS's work by default,

<citation needed>

you keep saying this, yet it doesn't accord with my understanding at
all. No-one installs OS X from scratch, really, so forget about that.
Windows is very keen on formatting disks, or at least was last time I
checked it. You had to go into an advanced dialog to do anything other
than let it have its way with an entire disk. From all my considerable
experience, Linux distros generally let you do whatever you like in some
way or other, and usually default to formatting an existing disk or
using free space. I can't think of one which 'defaults' to re-using
existing partitions.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
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