Re: [Base] Fedora Base Design Working Group (2014-02-21) meeting minutes and logs

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On Feb 21, 2014 3:20 PM, "Adam Williamson" <awilliam@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> On Fri, 2014-02-21 at 17:08 +0100, Phil Knirsch wrote:
>
> > Installer is still a hot topic, but thats nothing we could resolve
> > during our meeting and which might have to be brought up with FESCO again.
>
> So, as cmurf has been trying to point out on desktop@ , we (QA) have
> some concerns in this area too, and I know the installer team is open to
> the idea of at least simplifying the non-custom partitioning path to
> some extent.
>
> This is an extremely complex topic area, though, and it may be tricky to
> get the right things done if multiple teams are considering it in
> different contexts in different meetings. It would probably be a Very
> Good Idea to get everyone with an interest - at least anaconda team, the
> product WGs (except possibly Cloud, depending on whether they intend to
> use anaconda in their deliverables at all), base WG, and fesco -
> together in some way to talk about it. devconf would've been great but
> it already happened. Flock would be great but it's too late. Should we
> try to set up some kind of special meeting / list / etherpad /
> wikipage / *something* where we can all talk it over?
>
> To give a bit of background and detail in QA's interest:
>
> First, to ensure everyone actually knows what we're talking about, we
> tend to talk about two major partitioning 'paths' in anaconda: 'guided'
> and 'custom'. 'custom' may also be referred to as 'manual'.
>
> In both newUI and oldUI, 'guided' is simply what you get if you don't
> pick custom partitioning, when you are given the opportunity to do so.
> In oldUI, you had the screen which gave you about five choices of
> different partitioning 'approaches' (reformat the entire disk(s),
> reformat only the Linux partitions, resize existing partitions to create
> free space, just install into free space, maybe one or two others I
> forgot). In newUI there's a different workflow after you pick target
> disks on the Installation Destination spoke which, broadly, accomplishes
> the same options in a rather different way.
>
> Broadly, QA is interested in doing something similar to what desktop
> wants to do, for slightly different reasons.
>
> Historically, QA and anaconda more or less agreed on an approach whereby
> the 'guided' partitioning path would be expected to work extremely
> reliably: QA would undertake to test every (well, nearly every) route
> through that path regularly and proactively, and anaconda would
> undertake to fix the bugs. Custom partitioning was much more of a
> 'bonus' thing: if it worked, great. QA would test it as much as we had
> time for, and anaconda would fix as many bugs as they could after fixing
> higher priority stuff. I went back and looked at the history, and in the
> earlier days of Fedora, the guided path was consciously designed to be
> very 'choice free'.
>
> Later in the 'oldUI' days, the path to more complexity in the 'guided'
> path was opened up by a sort of hack. Some people did not want LVM
> (after it was made default waaaaay back in FC3 or something), and
> eventually this demand became so persistent that it was decided to stick
> a checkbox in the 'guided' partitioning path which let you get a plain
> ext(3/4) layout instead of an LVM layout.

I'm surprised that the desires of "some" people influenced the design of the ui. Unless those people are your superiors, you politely tell them that the point of the default path in the installer is to provide as stable a path as is possible while still working for most (I'm going to assume that the recent work on anaconda included asking what constitutes the later).
IMHO, creating a different ui for the WS installer would be ideal but I doubt that can happen. In lieu of that, you really need to make the default path be as stable as possible... which is to say more reliable that it is currently.

*SNIP*

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