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

[Chris Murphy]

On Feb 21, 2014, at 2:38 PM, John.Florian at dart.biz wrote:

> That makes a lot of sense, but I'd like to add that when doing custom partitioning, you can easily spend the bulk of your actual interaction time getting the partitioning customized exactly the way you want and when anaconda crashes,

What you're essentially suggesting is the necessary trade off between stability and features isn't being balanced, in your experience. I'd agree with that assessment. I've done hundreds of Windows installs and thousands of OS X installs and those installers never crash. Ever. Seriously never. You can throw the most bizarre crap at them, even a disk with 42 partitions of just linux and BSD and they don't crash. And what interaction time? It's point and install. There's nothing to interact with because there are no options.

> However, when I have my admin hat on, I want flexibility.

I don't find that a compelling argument for many reasons, not least of which is the tens of thousands of OS X and Windows admins who get few install time layout choices, and they seem quite content. And they don't even have a kickstart equivalent, so I think it's fair to say flexibility is served by kickstart.


>  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.  It only makes more work if I have to do an in place resize later on.  Having LVM on those host makes that resizing oh so much simpler though, especially if additional drives are required. 
> 
> I feel much the same about the /home partitioning and wish there was an checkbox in anaconda for that.  Having a separate /home partition is good practice, but I never use the feature because mine is on NFS, so it makes for lots of click work to get the auto layout, then remove the home.  (I did learn accidentally with btrfs I can just ignore it and I've not lost any space on /.) 

> So yes, simplicity is good, unless it makes everything else harder later. 

Elsewhere the idea is that the OS installer actually just installs the OS successfully. After that comes such customizations that we are putting into the installer that really don't need to be in the installer. Post-install if I decide I want /home on NFS, if I want encrypted /home, if I want to buy another drive and put /home on raid1, what do I use? Not Anaconda, it's an install time specific tool.

The idea of what Anaconda can do to create powerful storage stacks with open source software has significant merit. But it's in the wrong place. It's an anchor on the installer, and can only be leveraged during an install of RHEL, CentOS or Fedora.


Chris Murphy