Bloody Fedora Installation! (again)

[James Wilkinson]

Trevor Smith wrote:
> If there is a problem reading from the CD media during installation, you are 
> SERIOUSLY screwed. This happened to me also, and as I was upgrading an 
> existing FC1 installation, I lost everything. The reason: there is NO way to 
> recover from the install blockage except to find new disks, which, in some 
> instances, isn't possible to do in a reasonable time frame.
> 
> This is a major flaw in design of the install program.

So what's it supposed to do?

Remember that the whole point of an upgrade is to replace serveral
gigabytes of files (for a full install). That means over-write, get rid
of, destroy utterly. Once you're half-way through an install, then there
is nothing to which you can return.

There are, I suppose, ways around this. One would be to archive all the
replaced files somewhere. But, again, you're going to be looking at a
couple of gigabytes of archive space. You could journal this, and have
the option on the install CDs to roll back to where you were.

We have the technology: what we do *not* have, in general, is enough
space on the users' hard disks to store this, nor any idea of where
would be the Right Place to put these, nor existing partition schems
that support it.

You *could*, I suppose, try categorising all the OS' RPMS into "classes"
that definitely do need to be upgraded together, and upgrade one class
at a time, hoping that the end result would at least be bootable. But
this has to work for people upgrading from, say, Red Hat 7 (indeed,
these are the people who would *most* value the ability to roll back to
a Known Good state). I suspect that you'd get X.org depending on 
recent kernels, and Gnome depending on recent X, and all sorts of
unforeseen side-effects of half-way upgraded hybrids of everything
supported depending on which classes are installed.

> The inability to recover or even exit, short of turning the power off (yes 
> that's the only way out) from install errors like this is a ridiculous error.
> 
> (Waiting for the hail of "you idiot, all you had to do was..." emails.)

Did you try upgrading again? Rolling forwards is a lot more practical
than rolling back...

James.
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E-mail address: james | "In these troubled times, it's always refreshing to
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