F19 Final criteria revamp

[Chris Murphy]

On Jun 12, 2013, at 9:08 PM, Adam Williamson <awilliam at redhat.com> wrote:
> 
> For instance, if you have a heavily
> fragmented FAT32 or NTFS partition, resizing it is going to fail.

My expectation is the installer doesn't crash, the attempt leaves the disk untouched, and I get some coherent message indicating this. This expectation is reasonable, but still constitutes "support". I don't know what "doesn't support" could mean unless it applies uniformly to the entire distribution. If you ask for help with a problem related to resizing, I think you're as likely to get a response on it as anything else in Fedora.


> If you
> have an NTFS partition that's marked as not having been cleanly
> unmounted the last time you booted Windows, resizing it is going to
> fail. There are various other conditions like this.

The installer should produce a message to that effect, if the underlying tools give it a decipherable message or error code. That is still supporting resizing.



> 
> As I said, one thing we could do is add a carefully worded resize
> requirement: something like resize operations offered by the installer
> must trigger the correct action, i.e., if the installer lets you try and
> resize an NTFS partition to size X, it must pass the correct parameters
> to ntfsresize, and ntfsresize must be present and ideally not completely
> broken; beyond that, we offer no guarantees.

Guarantees? What does this mean for any kind of software? No software is guaranteeing anything. The way proprietary not free software EULAs are written, they could willfully format your hard drive and the company can't be held liable.


> That seems workable, but
> I'd want to run it by the anaconda team.

OK but the language used is important. I don't understand in what case "guarantee" is applicable. It seems it's always inapplicable, which means "not guaranteed" is likewise inapplicable.


Chris Murphy