Save state during install for FC6

[Don Russell]

Sherwood Botsford wrote:
> Scenario: You boot from CD, you answer several screens of questions, 
> you start the install. 3 cd's later it borks. Back to square 1. There 
> is no meaningful way to pick up the pieces.
>
> Principle: The system should become bootable as early as possible.
> Principle: The state of all your decisions should be saved as early as 
> possible.
>
> Ideally then if it borks on CD #3, you should be able to go away, burn 
> a new copy of CD#3
> come back, start with #1. On startup, Anaconda sees that there is a 
> file in the root file system called /install-status. Pop-up:
> "It appears that a previous installation failed. Would you like to:
>   <<*>>Try to continue the failed install.
>   <<*>>Start again."

Did you run all your CDs through the media check before beginning the 
install process, and even though they all passed, it still choked on CD 
3? If that's the case, there's something else wrong... :-)

I think the install process should be as *simple* as possible (to 
increase reliability) and I'd rather have resources spent on features 
that are of more use once the system is up and running. Keeping track of 
state as you suggest is too much work and would simply slow the process 
down, and require a lot of testing to be reliable.

You could create a kickstart disk/file if you think you may need to 
answer install-type questions multiple times. That might not be a bad 
idea anyway... then if you ever need to install from scratch again, you 
don't have to remember what the answers are... it's all right there on 
your kickstart disk. :-)