Re: FC-4 -- unhappy experiences

From: Matthew Miller (mattdm_at_mattdm.org)
Date: 06/17/05

  • Next message: Ralph Jones: "FC4 upgrade problem" 
    Date: Fri, 17 Jun 2005 10:15:43 -0400
To: For users of Fedora Core releases <fedora-list@redhat.com>

    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@mattdm.org        <http://www.mattdm.org/>
Boston University Linux      ------>                <http://linux.bu.edu/>
Current office temperature: 77 degrees Fahrenheit.
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