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

[Karel Zak]

On Fri, Feb 21, 2014 at 02:04:54PM -0800, Adam Williamson wrote:
> 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.

 Don't try to be smart to everyone, it does not work. IMHO all you
 need is to support one or a very few scenarios (complete scenarios 
 without customization) and a way how to switch from installer
 to manual partitioning by parted/fdisk/mdadm/mkfs/etc. 
 
 The anaconda partitioning UI will never be smart enough for 
 advanced users and it also does not make sense to duplicate effort, 
 we *already have* tools to create all the unusual crazy disk layouts.

    Karel

-- 
 Karel Zak  <kzak at redhat.com>
 http://karelzak.blogspot.com