Disk Druid - Fedora flame #1

[Jeff Vian]

On Mon, 2005-01-24 at 20:30 -0500, William Hooper wrote:
> Jeff Vian said:
> [snip]
> >> So by your own reasoning, we need
> >> to remove DD complete and just put a dialog that asks where to put / and
> >>  put everything there.  That's it.
> >>
> >
> > That is EXACTLY what _was_ done by putting in the autopartition option.
> > and the opposite is what I feel would be better.
> 
> Autopartition option... not requirement.
> 
agreed

> > BTW William,
> > Much earlier in this thread you asked me a question about DD and its
> > partitioning related to what it did for me. I recently did a new install
> > and checked carefully the results.
> >
> > 1.  DD chose the order to place the partitions.  That was NOT the order
> > they were defined in.  I created / as the second partition, but DD chose to
> > make it hda5 on its own.  It displayed the order in the gui bar
> > dynamically as they were defined (in its own order, but with sizes as
> > specified)
> [snip]
> 
> Which is as I observed.  The comment I was responding to said that DD
> changed somewhere between what the GUI says and what was written to the
> disk.  I'm still waiting for a repeatable case of that, BTW.
> 
In my case, I said DD changed from what I specified to what it wrote. 

I do not recall in the last use of DD (much more than a year ago with
RH9) how the gui and the list related to the order I defined them in.  I
know it was not what I expected and thus IMNSHO at that time it was
broke and I began using fdisk exclusively.

> > This type of (at least somewhat uncontrollable) AI is what I see as a
> > problem.  Even Partition Magic on Windows respects the order in which
> > partitions are defined and positions them accordingly.  DD does not.
> 
> For the vast majority of people it doesn't make a lot of difference. 
> Framing the installer around special cases is the path to insanity.
> 
> [snip]
> > Why not 2 major paths in the installer?  one for the Expert and one for
> > the new user.
> [snip]
> 
> We've been there and done that and got the T-shirt.  All it leads to is
> going around in circles until someone finally mentions "Oh, and I hit that
> thing that said expert at the beginning".
> 
Now you see the problem that hits ALL tech support staff.
__Communication__.

However, that still does not justify making it more difficult for those
who _do_ have a clue. 

> IMHO the fdisk situation is the perfect way to fix it.  People that care
> that strongly can get to it, the other 90% who don't give a damn can go
> through the install.  Of all the threads on this list, how many of them
> are about partitioning during the install (other than "how big should I
> make /var" and the like)?  I really believe this is a mole hill, not a
> mountain.
> 
For partitioning you are likely right. (Yes, I do tech support so I also
have been there and got the T-shirt.) Once I understand what is
happening the unexpected is not so unexpected nor unmanageable. 
> --
> William Hooper
>