On Fri, Jun 17, 2005 at 03:05:55PM +0100, Timothy Murphy wrote: > I wonder if there is something basically wrong > with the Anaconda development? That's a little harsh. I'd have to say the basic answer is "no, there isn't". But if you want to contribute, please do. > >From the little I've seen of it, > it seems to me excessively complicated, > and also lacking in clear motivation. It's complicated because it's a complicated task. And I have no idea what you even mean by "lacking in clear motivation". The motivation seems pretty clear to me: it's the Fedora Installer. > Eg should the latest version of Anaconda work > on any machine the previous version worked on? > That doesn't seem to me an unreasonable aim. It does to me. Eventually, really old hardware and weird situations have to get dropped, or you get *more* excessive complication and cruft. You can't have it both ways. > I upgrade rather than install because I do not have great confidence > that the installation will work. > Eg no installation has worked on a SCSI only machine since Redhat-9. Since I install on SCSI-only machines all the time, this is clearly not true. > The worst problem with FC-4 was on a machine (Asus motherboard) > with two SCSI disks and an IDE disk. > The upgrade seemed to get completely confused about the IDE disk, > which it could not find. > I managed to complete the upgrade by using Knoppix > to delete references to /dev/hda1 in /etc/fstab . Deleting references made it work? That seems odd. Anyway, Anaconda is more conservative with hardware probing than Knoppix is. > The upgrade itself on an AMD Athlon64 machine went OK, > but after it I get innumerable errors > when trying to compile a virgin kernel. > Eg "make xconfig" does not work because qtlib is not found. This isn't an installer problem at all. This is a person-building-the-kernel problem. > The upgrade bombed out on a Sony Picturebook (C1VFK) > while "Reading package information", > with some kind of Python error. Read the release notes. > [Am I alone in feeling that Python brings up more errors > than its predecessors, eg Perl ?] Thank God anaconda isn't written in perl! Its predecessor was written in C, and was a horrid code nightmare. As for "brings up more errors", that's largely because Python provides tracebacks with a lot of data, so it seems intimidating. It's not like the errors wouldn't be there otherwise. -- Matthew Miller mattdm@xxxxxxxxxx <http://www.mattdm.org/> Boston University Linux ------> <http://linux.bu.edu/> Current office temperature: 77 degrees Fahrenheit.
