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

[Adam Williamson]

On Fri, 2011-10-21 at 08:16 -0400, Kamil Paral wrote:
> > > Um, yes it is? "The only concern I ever had for my layout is
> > > whether the next distro installer would be smart enough to
> > > let me skip formatting of the / partition."
> > 
> > I belive that ...
> > 
> > you talk about the action itself
> > 
> > Kamil talks about *allowing* the action
> 
> Speaking for myself: if the default behavior is to format the root
> partition, and I have to find a small obscure deep hidden checkbox and
> then confirm a big fat warning to persuade the installer not to format
> it, I'm perfectly content with that solution. I don't object against
> the default behavior, but I like when there is an option "yes, I am an
> advanced user and yes, I really know what I am doing, thank you very
> much" that allows me to override it.

'Advanced' user interfaces are far more problematic than they first
appear.

There's two major problems with them: one, as a developer, you now have
an obscure code path which is going to break all the time because you'll
forget about it because most people don't use it, but when it breaks,
it'll make the few people who *do* use it very unhappy.

Two, hiding things behind 'advanced' buttons and 'don't do this unless
you really know what you're doing' disclaimers _doesn't work_ and has
been proven not to work many times. Ask any developer who's tried to use
such tricks for a while: they will have war stories about bugs filed by
people who used the option who clearly didn't have a clue what the hell
they were doing yet clicked through all the tiny checkboxes and dire
warnings anyway.

I think the only way that trick actually works for anaconda is to use a
kernel parameter as then you actually have to *read some documentation*
to find it rather than just clicking around (shock!), but even then, the
'trick' will eventually find its way onto forums where people who don't
have a clue what they're doing will find it and break their systems.

It's just not a great UI design.

It _might_ be worthwhile in this case if there are reasonable use cases
the anaconda team didn't consider, but I'm not sure any of those raised
so far qualify. Want a separate /home partition? Have a separate /home
partition. Want to provision your systems with some standard
configuration? Use a post-install provisioning tool, of which there are
many, including that RH/Fedora one whose name I *still* can't freakin'
remember.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | identi.ca: adamwfedora
http://www.happyassassin.net