Partitioning criteria revision proposal

[Adam Williamson]

On Wed, 2012-10-10 at 23:33 -0700, Adam Williamson wrote:
> On Thu, 2012-10-11 at 01:15 -0500, Ian Pilcher wrote:
> > On 10/11/2012 12:31 AM, Adam Williamson wrote:
> > > We agreed at the blocker review meeting this morning that "most
> > > commonly-used filesystem types" was really pretty vague and
> > > unsatisfactory. The specific case we were considering was LVM. In the
> > > end we agreed that, really, at Beta stage, anaconda ought to be capable
> > > of dealing with any filesystem / device type it offers (the 'device
> > > types' are LVM, RAID and btrfs). If a type isn't working it needs to be
> > > either fixed or suppressed (as we did for the last couple of oldui
> > > releases with btrfs - we suppressed it from the list as it wasn't
> > > working). The intent here isn't to cover every possible bizarre
> > > permutation anyone can come up with (the Final criterion does do that),
> > > but more that just simply creating a partition in a pretty normal,
> > > everyday way with any of the options offered shouldn't cause the
> > > installer to fall over and die. Please, anaconda folks, if you think
> > > this is too optimistic and you think we should exclude specific types or
> > > limit the criterion to a specific subset of types, yell.
> > 
> > Am I interpreting this correctly to mean that a beta can go out without
> > support for software RAID and/or LVM, as long as they are not offered in
> > the Anaconda interface?  If so, uugh.
> 
> Well, that's a complex question. =)
> 
> As far as the release criteria would be concerned, yes. My thinking is
> that it's ultimately not exactly QA's decision what filesystem / device
> types anaconda ought to offer, which is sort of what we'd be doing by
> specifying particular types in the criteria, and it gets a bit unwieldy
> to specify every type we reckon is important or isn't.
> 
> So in theory, sure, anaconda could drop RAID out of the interface and
> the proposed criterion would be satisfied. But that decision could be
> challenged _on its own merits_ rather than via the blocker process.
> 
> I do see what you're saying though, like I said, I'm not sure I've got
> everything right here. It would be good to know what more people think
> about whether we should get into the business of specifying 'critical'
> partition / device types in the criteria or not. anaconda folks reading?

To give a specific proposal here, which I find always focuses minds, we
could simply adjust the relevant line to read:

Creating and, optionally, encrypting partitions of any specified size
using all offered device and filesystem types. RAID-0, RAID-1, RAID-5
and LVM must be offered as device types, and ext4 must be offered as a
filesystem type

Tweak as desired, but you get the idea. That's how we could do it if we
do go down the road of ignoring my addiction to non-specificity and just
specifying particular types in the criteria. Of course, we'd have to
adjust it over time, like when btrfs becomes more commonly used than
RAID and LVM in the Glorious Future.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | identi.ca: adamwfedora
http://www.happyassassin.net