F21 partitioning circus

[Chris Murphy]

On Wed, Feb 25, 2015 at 1:44 AM, Heinz Diehl <htd+ml at fritha.org> wrote:
> On 24.02.2015, jd1008 wrote:
>
>> Myself, I always know how to tell anaconda I will manually partition
>> the drive, without resorting to external tools.
>> But I cannot assume that ALL other people have the know-how to
>> manually partition their drives.
>
> A simple solution would be to do whatever is necessary for the vast majority
> in anaconda, but to have one single button which says: "full control,
> do what you want, this can eat your dog".

One single button with 4000 lines of code behind it. You assume that
providing full control in a GUI just happens magically as if that work
is already done and the Anaconda folks are willfully disabling things.
That's not how it works. In the GUI world, there is a void. Where
there is substance, there is a lot of code. So when you say full
control to do what you want, you're talking about a lot of substance
and therefore a lots and lots of code.

And setting that aside, it's really not OK to put hurt me buttons in
GUI programs. The disclosure really doesn't get you out of blowing up
someone's setup. I mean, presumably you want it to work, otherwise why
are you asking for it? So now it has to be tested, and bugs found, and
it all has to be maintained or it will break.

> Bug reports based on the
> use of this button automatically would be labeled WONTFIX. Period.

Right well, we've seen this happen already with system-config-lvm
being deprecated, and a bunch (all?) LVM support in Gnome Disks being
yanked. No one wanted to do the work to maintain this stuff. So away
it goes. So you're saying that someone should build it, and then not
maintain it, and once it breaks the bugs are set to WONTFIX meaning
overtime the entire interface you're talking about building is
completely untrustworthy.

No.

When you sign up for building roads, you're signing up for maintaining
them. If you don't have the budget or interest to make them safe and
usable for some decent period of time, don't build in them in the
first place. It's a waste of resources.


> Following this thread, I guess this won't happen..

I'm not associated with the installer team. I have no idea what their
plans are. I have very little idea of what sorts of things they'd
accept. Therefore I do not speak for them at all. But I can pretty
much guarantee you they are not going to maintain someone else's idea,
nor would they accept an additional interface without a maintenance
plan. And that assumes you've presented a viable use case scenario.

Based on what I'm hearing, I'd recommend no go. Instead, please put
these resources into accessibility. I'd rather make life easier for
the vision impaired before spending more resources coddling so called
power users who won't/can't use CLI tools or kickstart and want to
produce questionable layouts. At least you have some tools to do what
you want. Let's get real.


-- 
Chris Murphy