Improving the Fedora boot experience

[Nils Philippsen]

On Tue, 2013-03-12 at 23:52 +0100, Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
> Le Mar 12 mars 2013 19:04, Peter Jones a écrit :
> 
> > Obviously we need to do a good job of making sure we tolerate failures,
> > and there are multiple ways to do this - if you reboot N times within M
> > seconds or somesuch might be a worthwhile heuristic.
> 
> By definition an heuristic is unreliable. The current mechanism, while
> not-pretty, is reliable. Reliability is the major property you want in any
> rescue system. (that's why safety jackets use flashy unfashionable colors)

Just for the record, (non/less) deterministic != (un)reliable.

Take the following numbers with a grain of salt because I obviously
pulled them out of a hat: If we have error detection that "only" catches
say 95% of error conditions, why shouldn't we use it to make these cases
bearable (for power users anyway), additionally to say 80% of normal
boots "awesome" for everyone at the cost of making the remaining 1% a
little less easy -- e.g. having to push a keycombo which you have to
know at that point. Making this knowledge discoverable is something else
and IMO has no place in the boot process (because it just confuses,
annoys in 99% of cases).

People who want to be power users will find this out, even if we fail to
make that information easily discoverable. People who don't have these
ambitions won't magically want to turn into power users because we
advertise "here's where power users turn right" during every boot.

Nils
-- 
Nils Philippsen      "Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase 
Red Hat               a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty
nils at redhat.com       nor Safety."  --  Benjamin Franklin, 1759
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