Installation plays hardball

[Chris Tyler]

On Thu, 2009-12-31 at 19:47 +0000, Patrick O'Callaghan wrote:
> Somewhat OT: IMHO one thing that makes installing Fedora harder than it
> needs to be for the majority of users is the default use of LVM. I've
> been using Fedora since before it was Fedora, and have *never* had a
> situation in which LVM was any use to me. I understand the benefits it
> brings to large installations with complex and varying storage
> requirements, but that's not the case for most people and having to deal
> with its highly domain-specific terminology turns it into a mental
> obstacle that would be better avoided.

I thought that both LVM technology and its benefits were widely
understood by now. It has a lot of value even in a single-disk
situation: you can shuffle space between filesystems, migrate data to a
new disk, add space from a new disk to an existing filesystem, and
create a copy-on-write snapshot of a filesystem -- and do most of that
while the system is running. It's saved my bacon more times than I want
to admit.

Rather than remove LVM from the default installation, perhaps we need to
do a better job of explaining what it does and how to use it
effectively.

-Chris