Custom UEFI layout with /boot/efi, bug 1168118

[Chris Murphy]

On Tue, Mar 3, 2015 at 6:19 PM, Adam Williamson
<adamwill at fedoraproject.org> wrote:

> That bug isn't really a design choice bug. It's a hoary codepath bug.
> Your concerns in this mail are fairly orthogonal to the specific
> problem I'm trying to deal with there.

It is not orthogonal. It is perhaps chicken and egg.

Comment 59:
Your steps 2, 3 and 7 are possible because of design choice. Without
those steps, the bug would not be triggered, the existing guided code
would create the ESP in the expected location for the is_valid check
code.

And then you say:
"anaconda runs the is_valid_stage1_device() checks when you enter
custom partitioning and rejects your choice because vdb does not yet
contain a 'valid' stage1 target device"

Exactly my point, rejects your *choice* (which you should not even
have). This choice is giving users razor blades, telling them to go
play on the freeway, and you're saying we need to build a safer
freeway. Which might be true, but I think stepping back and
eliminating the razor blades and bad advice [1] to start out with has
a high degree of dramatically altering the fixes for your freeway
(code path).[2]

How do you know for sure the hairy code problem you're trying to fix
simply vanishes entirely through optimization as a result of no longer
involving the user at all?


[1] I have emphasized this on UEFI, but BIOS+GPT causes this user
burden to happen too and worse because the UI says I'm creating a
mount point, but BIOSBoot has no mount point! And I'm required to
reformat it! But there is no such thing as formatting a BIOSboot
partition! So we use wrong terminology and describe the functionality
wrong in the installer, and yet users are supposed to know what
they're doing? This is a double standard. By golly the user should
know, but the installer, well it can totally distort how things really
work because hi.

[2] We already have identical code path for BIOS+MBR between guided
and custom expressly because there is no user choice! They aren't
given the option to create an MBR gap on this device or that device,
of this or that size, or reuse it or reformat it, etc.

-- 
Chris Murphy