On Mon, 2005-01-24 at 20:30 -0500, William Hooper wrote: > Jeff Vian said: > [snip] > >> So by your own reasoning, we need > >> to remove DD complete and just put a dialog that asks where to put / and > >> put everything there. That's it. > >> > > > > That is EXACTLY what _was_ done by putting in the autopartition option. > > and the opposite is what I feel would be better. > > Autopartition option... not requirement. > agreed > > BTW William, > > Much earlier in this thread you asked me a question about DD and its > > partitioning related to what it did for me. I recently did a new install > > and checked carefully the results. > > > > 1. DD chose the order to place the partitions. That was NOT the order > > they were defined in. I created / as the second partition, but DD chose to > > make it hda5 on its own. It displayed the order in the gui bar > > dynamically as they were defined (in its own order, but with sizes as > > specified) > [snip] > > Which is as I observed. The comment I was responding to said that DD > changed somewhere between what the GUI says and what was written to the > disk. I'm still waiting for a repeatable case of that, BTW. > In my case, I said DD changed from what I specified to what it wrote. I do not recall in the last use of DD (much more than a year ago with RH9) how the gui and the list related to the order I defined them in. I know it was not what I expected and thus IMNSHO at that time it was broke and I began using fdisk exclusively. > > This type of (at least somewhat uncontrollable) AI is what I see as a > > problem. Even Partition Magic on Windows respects the order in which > > partitions are defined and positions them accordingly. DD does not. > > For the vast majority of people it doesn't make a lot of difference. > Framing the installer around special cases is the path to insanity. > > [snip] > > Why not 2 major paths in the installer? one for the Expert and one for > > the new user. > [snip] > > We've been there and done that and got the T-shirt. All it leads to is > going around in circles until someone finally mentions "Oh, and I hit that > thing that said expert at the beginning". > Now you see the problem that hits ALL tech support staff. __Communication__. However, that still does not justify making it more difficult for those who _do_ have a clue. > IMHO the fdisk situation is the perfect way to fix it. People that care > that strongly can get to it, the other 90% who don't give a damn can go > through the install. Of all the threads on this list, how many of them > are about partitioning during the install (other than "how big should I > make /var" and the like)? I really believe this is a mole hill, not a > mountain. > For partitioning you are likely right. (Yes, I do tech support so I also have been there and got the T-shirt.) Once I understand what is happening the unexpected is not so unexpected nor unmanageable. > -- > William Hooper >
