/ must be on a partition or LV that will be formatted. Reusing an existing / is not allowed.

[David Lehman]

On Tue, 2011-10-18 at 00:25 -0400, Felix Miata wrote:
> This is the only place I can remember encountering such an installation 
> restriction. My 40 or so machines average in excess of 6 OSes per. There's 
> just no room for a forced procedural deviation of this magnitude in my 
> environment. Even Windows allows to install to an existing partition without 
> formatting it. It just overwrites whatever it pleases, which I can, have 
> been, and do accept. Other distros apparently have no problem doing the same, 
> and without disposing of entire directory trees as Anaconda has. Its name is apt.

Let me try to explain why this is an unreasonable expectation: Anaconda
is not yum. Anaconda cannot predict what files will need to be removed.
Anaconda cannot predict what file will, if present, effect the behavior
of certain packages/applications or in what way. This is not something
we are going to try to figure out how to do. The reasonable solution is
for you to develop better habits of system administration. That means
separating user data from system data. Resizing a partition in order to
create a separate /home is a one-time effort that fedora's inflexible
and unfriendly installer can even do for you.

> 
> > I'm sorry if this is inconvenient, but it does seem a bit over the top
> > to issue an ultimatum like that. You can't always expect every cool
> 
> I simply stated some facts. I've been doing what I've been doing many years. 
> It works to save me time, easing the post-installation pain, so there's no 
> other compelling reason for me to change. It'll free up time to spend on 
> friendlier and more flexible installers that don't require 150% of average 
> minimum RAM just to initialize, and to spend the time necessary to relearn 
> everything I knew about sysvinit that systemd scattered to the four winds.

It is not reasonable to expect us to spend extra time writing extra code
that can never be expected to work reliably just to save you the time of
developing good data management practices. Sorry. What you are
essentially demanding here is not something that makes sense.

Dave