Proposing new dual booting release criteria

[Adam Williamson]

On Sun, 2014-08-24 at 12:23 -0500, Michael Catanzaro wrote:

> Windows
> =======
> 
> Our current release criterion is:
> 
> "The installer must be able to install into free space alongside an
> existing clean Windows installation and, when performing a BIOS (not
> UEFI) installation, install a bootloader which can boot into both
> Windows and Fedora."
> 
> I propose the language be amended to the following:
> 
> "The installer must be able to install into free space alongside an
> existing clean Windows installation and install a bootloader which can
> boot into both Windows and Fedora."
> 
> Rationale: many modern Windows systems no longer have a boot menu that
> is accessible before the system boots. If Fedora Workstation were
> installed on such a system, the user would not be able to recover
> Windows.

I kind of thought we'd already made this change, but if we haven't, we
certainly should now, UEFI is too common to be excepted. +1

> Open bugs that would be covered by this criterion:
> 
> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=986731
> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1010704
> 
> OS X
> ====
> 
> I propose the following final release criterion:
> 
> "The installer must be able to install into free space alongside an
> existing clean OS X installation and install a bootloader which can boot
> into both OS X and Fedora, OR the installer must prominently warn the
> user that he may be unable to boot OS X after installation, allowing the
> user to cancel installation and reboot to OS X."
> 
> I think that requirement should be easy to meet, so I won't include
> links to the OS X bugs.

I don't have any particular argument with it, though I'm not sure if
it's entirely release criterion material. It'd be good to know what the
anaconda devs think.

> Linux
> =====
> 
> We currently do not have any release criterion that applies to dual
> booting with other Linux systems. Dual booting with other Linux systems
> is NOT a requirement in the Workstation technical specification, but the
> consensus seems to be that it should have been. Therefore I propose the
> following criterion:
> 
> "The installer must be able to install into free space alongside
> existing GNU/Linux installations and install a bootloader which can boot
> into the previously-installed systems and Fedora."
> 
> I have no doubt that you will need to tweak the wording here, but the
> intent should be clear. If such a broad requirement isn't technically
> feasible, then let's discuss what would be.

I don't believe it's feasible that broadly worded, no. There are a *lot*
of Linux distributions, and we certainly don't auto-detect even a
default installation of all of them, never mind all the crazy layouts
and bootloader configurations people might be able to come up with.

Note that we're heavily dependent on upstream code, here - we basically
farm the bootloader detection of other OSes out to grub2, which is what
other distros do as well. We probably all act fairly similarly here,
these days. /etc/grub.d/30_os-prober is what does most of the magic.

A more feasible criterion, for me, would be something like 'successful
dual boot with default single-disk install of other Fedora versions and
other "major" distributions', however we choose to define major exactly.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | XMPP: adamw AT happyassassin . net
http://www.happyassassin.net