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

[Chris Lumens]

> And yet several people here on your volunteer test team, the people
> who are willing and able to use new releases early so that problems
> are fleshed out and can be addressed before release, have stated
> that they use this ability on a regular basis and would be pained to
> see it go.
> 
> A reasonable person might conclude from that, "We thought that no
> one does this, but perhaps we were wrong and need to reevaluate that
> assumption." You are, instead, continuing to assert that no one
> needs to do this, in the fact of knowledgeable users saying that
> they do, in fact, need to.

What I am saying here is that the amount of work required to support
this outweighs the benefit.  You are talking about doing all sorts of
things in RPM and in anaconda, when we're really just going to end up
chasing around bugs resulting from it.

It's a question of what is the best use of our time.  Do we spend it
working on fixing partitioning and bootloader bugs that affect everyone,
or do we spend it trying to decipher bug reports from people who chose
to install on top of an existing partition?

> >(outside of the formatting with
> >special options that you can do with kickstart, in which case you're
> >getting the known good starting point I mentioned earlier).  I can,
> >however, remember people reusing / by accident many times and then
> >filing bugs.
> If it is possible to reuse / "by accident" then the installer UI
> needs to be fixed.

The bug was that this was allowed.  It has been fixed.  It has never
been our intention that you can do this in the UI.  People got used to
being able to do so, and that is unfortunate, but that is the bug.

The installer UI itself is undergoing a redesign and rework.  We won't
be allowing you to reuse / in the new UI either.

> You know as well as I do that this does not address the use case
> that people are talking about here. Please don't be puerile.

We cannot support every use case.  This is one that falls into the realm
of unsupportable.  By making you format /, we are ensuring the system
starts from a known state, one that we can perform an installation to
and have a reasonable chance of succeeding at, and one that will have a
reasonable chance of working for the user.

- Chris