F21 partitioning circus

[Chris Murphy]

On Wed, Feb 25, 2015 at 6:41 AM, Ralf Corsepius <rc040203 at freenet.de> wrote:
> On 02/24/2015 05:56 PM, Chris Murphy wrote:
>>
>> On Tue, Feb 24, 2015 at 8:51 AM, Ralf Corsepius <rc040203 at freenet.de>
>> wrote:
>
>
>>> Similar restriction apply elsewhere. E.g. I have an older BIOS system
>>> which
>>> for (at least to me) unknown reasons refuses to boot from
>>> chained/cascaded
>>> grub partitions beyond some disk-limits.
>>
>>
>> Quite old,
>
>
> It's a 2008 netbook, I am facing this issue with. It has Windows, Fedora 20,
> Fedora 21, Ubuntu and SuSE installed in parallel on ca. 12-15 partitions.

I mean the BIOS, not computer. I have a ~2002 computer with ~2004 BIOS
firmware (updated) that boots from 2+TB drives using GPT where
BIOSBoot is not at the start but quite beyond 1TB and it works. In
other configurations I've had it where there's no partition map at
all, and I put the bootloader in the 64KB pad on Btrfs. That works.
Anyway, I don't know why your firmware is uncooperative but it ought
not be up to the firmware once GRUB is loaded.

>
>>> In more complex multiboot configurations (e.g. several different linux
>>> distros, several releases of the same distro, several different
>>> configurations of the same distro), other aspects come into play, which
>>> more
>>> or less are personal preference, such as keeping an OSs' partitions
>>> consecutively together, whether to share or not to share boot or swap
>>> partitions etc.
>>
>>
>> Right and this cannot possibly be supported by Fedora absent an agreed
>> upon boot specification.
>
> Why would you want to try supporting this?

I definitely don't. I'd rather a finger in my eyeball.


>
> An "Expert mode" with options to partition manually, an option to manually
> specify the install location of a boot loader/partition and to specify mount
> points would suffice this need.

In Fedora, "supported" basically means we block on it if it doesn't
work. The installer is sacrosanct, everything offered in it should
work or we should block: the reality is that QA is more tolerant of
such broken things than I am, mainly because they already put in
massive amounts of time on blockers that are installer related, and if
they blocked on every broken thing in the installer we'd never ship.
And that's the reason why I take the position I have which is: it
cannot be important enough to even be included in the first place, if
we don't have the resources to test every single option, every single
outcome, and block if they don't work as intended.

Expert modes in GUIs are dog crap. They're a cesspool for bugs to
creep in and blow up in hapless users' faces and I think that's
inherently wrong. It's worse to have a bug in a GUI that breaks
someone's system than it is to strip out all the "expert" stuff and
not even offer it in the GUI to begin with.

Expert mode is kickstart and the CLI tools that do exactly what you want.

>
>>> But the converse applies: "A tool which doesn't suffice my needs, will
>>> not
>>> be my choice and will loose me as a customer"
>>
>>
>> Yes, but it's a 60+ email thread and the people complaining about
>> Anaconda Manual Partitioning, especially the "custom isn't custom"
>> claim  haven't produced any examples or bugs of what they want to do
>> that the installer won't allow.
>
> This is no surprise to me. Most people (comprising me) don't do installs on
> a regular basis.
>
> All I can say, last time I performed a fresh install on a machine with
> pre-configured Windows, back in Dec, I tried to use automated partitioning
> but it failed (Sorry, I did not keep book about it).
> I found myself resorting to manually resizing/moving partitions using
> Windows and gparted from rescuecd, and later pre-partitioned it for Fedora,
> again using rescuecd. Afterwards, installation went real problems.
>
> A detail I recall on another machine was the Live-DVD-stuff having failing
> miserably, because it ran out of memory and bombed out due to Gnome's
> requirement on 3d. I ended up using the Xfce-DVD and preconfiguring a swap
> partition.

What you're talking about is the installer's expert mode! That's as
expert as it gets, and you're saying that it's broken in your case, so
then you're complaining about how it ought to work. There is no free
lunch here. Where are the bug reports?

If people aren't actually going to test what we have, and file bug
report, so it has a chance of getting fixed, it just proves my point
that these things should be removed. We need less, not more stuff that
people won't test. Get rid of the boogers that we can't seem to flick
off.

Stability and trustworthiness are immensely more valuable in a GUI
installer than "expert" features; let alone "expert" features that
only sometimes work.


-- 
Chris Murphy