Issues with the Live CD requirement for separate /boot

[Adam Williamson]

On Tue, 2009-06-09 at 21:15 -0400, Scott Robbins wrote:

> > Ideally it would be best to direct people to the appropriate bit of the
> > release notes:
> > 
> > http://docs.fedoraproject.org/release-notes/f11/en-US/sect-Release_Notes-File_Systems.html
> > 
> 
> They'll miss it.  Even if they get that far through the release notes,
> it has to boldly state--you CAN'T INSTALL THE LIVE CD ON ONE PARTITION. 

Yes, as I said, it's not a very good note.

> Fedora, like many others, has begun aiming very strongly at the sort of
> person who is willing to sacrifice control for convenience.  ArchLinux,
> the BSDs, Gentoo....the sort of people who do take time to read docs
> before upgrading tend to go for that sort of distribution.  
> 
> Not that one is better than the other, but in trying to make it a click
> and click and you're done distribution, you're going to get the click
> and click wanting people.   

That's not really an accurate characterization, I don't think. I'd say
more that Fedora is working on _developing the tools_ that make
designing a click and click and you're done distro possible, but Fedora
is not that distro. (RHEL is, on the desktop side.)

> As for directing people to read the release notes--this is almost a
> customer service type thing--the person is having problems, and saying
> you should have read the notes is just going to further aggravate them.

That's not what I meant. I simply meant link them to the release notes
for the explanation, not anywhere else. I didn't mean to tell them they
_should_ have read it already. There's no need to beat people about the
head.

> In a perfect world, sure, they should read the release notes, but when
> you have a distribution that is aimed at ease of use it attracts a
> different type of user. 

I disagree. Mandriva truly is a click-and-click-and-you're-done
distribution, but most of its users are now accustomed to reading the
release notes and errata for each release, because we made a concerted
effort over a couple of years to use these documents as canonical
sources, make sure everything was covered in them (and not split up
across multiple itty bitty sources with varying official status), and
link to them all the time.

> The days of a one line reply to such a complaint on the forums of, RTFM,
> have, for better or worse,  become a thing of the past.  

That's really not what I was talking about. View it as an engineering
challenge, if you like. You don't duplicate code all over the place and
spread it around disparate places, you group it all neatly into one
library and use that library everywhere. Ditto with release-relevant
information: come up with a coherent story on where it should be, train
all the relevant people to contribute to those sources, and refer to
those sources consistently.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
http://www.happyassassin.net