The Prophecy of the 9 comes true (Fedora 9 walks the earth!)

[Felix Miata]

On 2008/05/13 22:15 (GMT) Kevin Kofler apparently typed:

> Felix Miata <mrmazda <at> ij.net> writes:

>> Would be nice if
>>http://docs.fedoraproject.org/release-notes/f9/en_US/sn-Installer.html#sn-scsi-partition-limit
>> was considerably less subtle about the risk of uninstallability in the
>> absence of a new disk or disk wipe to put it on:
>> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=430836

> You're overdramatizing here:

Not it all. It wouldn't be so bad if it would simply refuse to do anything,
but Anaconda leads you to believe it can succeed by allowing installation to
proceed through selection of (pre-existing) perfectly valid mount points
(sdX15 or below), then crashing, instead of refusing to proceed, or, as
Ubuntu, OpenSUSE & Mandriva do, allowing installation to sdx15 or below
without the waste of time crashing.

> as you say in the bug report, this only hits
> people with more than 15 partitions on a PATA disk. This hasn't been supported 
> ever since libata was introduced in Fedora 7.

Fedora 7 took the lead in obsoleting all systems so configured, and only a
little over a year ago. It takes much longer than a year for systems to get
replaced under Fedora's new and arbitrary libata installation demands. Even
now SUSE (11.0 not yet released) and Mandriva (2008.1 just released) still
include legacy drivers as an installation option, which means upgraders from
those earlier versions of those systems needn't get stopped cold as now
happens with Fedora. And now with support for the last of
pre-exclusive-libata Fedora versions falling out of support, it will happen
more often by those who previously were not motivated to upgrade to each most
recent release.

> There's a big margin between an
> empty disk and a disk with 16+ partitions, so claiming it will only install on 
> an empty disk is misleading.

There's no good reason for installation crashing doing something other major
distros' installers have no problem with. That's why relnote elaboration needed.

Moreover, what Anaconda really should do, in addition to not crashing, is
provide access to all pre-existing partitions, whether on SATA or PATA or
even real SCSI, via device mapper. Just because LVM exists doesn't mean it's
best for everyone.
-- 
". . . . in everything, do to others what you would
have them do to you . . . ."       Matthew 7:12 NIV

 Team OS/2 ** Reg. Linux User #211409

Felix Miata  ***  http://fm.no-ip.com/