Bug 1970319

Hello,

Kickstart partial installations are not supported. In general there could be situations which are possible to set by kickstart but we can't show/configure them in UI. Because of that we can't guarantee that the partial installations will work.

if a kickstart installation is stopped for any reason, previously and expectedly we were able to continue the installation by resolving whatever the missing component was. 

Kickstarts are required for the most advanced partitioning, not everything can be done in the GUI. What this bug is requesting is to keep the partitioning layout set by a kickstart, which we previously had. Even if something is missing or incorrect.

If a kickstart is wrong, and "cmdline" is used, the installation should exit immediately.
 - if text or cmdline is used, the installer allows you to make changes and continue the installation

If we're wiping away any manual partitioning, we are taking away this feature of the installer. 


Note:
When we have an option to prevent interaction even in graphical mode:

   --non-interactive - Performs the installation in a completely non-interactive mode. This mode will terminate the installation when user interaction is required.

The the inverse should be true as well. Resetting the partitioning scheme for any kickstart issues is a bug. This should work as it previously has.

I understand the reasoning but it is unfortunately pretty fragile. Kickstart has bigger possibilities than UI is able to show. So, you can get to the situation where the UI will crash because it can't show your kickstart partitioning.

RHEL 7 and below allowed this behaviour and we document that this is possible in the installation guides. This includes RHEL 8's installation guide.

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Items that are not required can be omitted. Omitting any required item results in the installation program changing to the interactive mode so that the user can provide an answer to the related item, just as during a regular interactive installation. It is also possible to declare the kickstart script as non-interactive with the cmdline command. In non-interactive mode, any missing answer aborts the installation process.

https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterprise_linux/8/html-single/performing_an_advanced_rhel_installation/index#sect-kickstart-file-create
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If it's not possible to fix this, or we won't fix it, then we should update the documentation:
 - To reflect that you can not continue an installation with custom partitioning defined in the kickstart
 - List this as a deprecated feature? (It was never clearly listed as something that could be done but now it does not work and customers who look for it may not easily identify it's now gone if all we do is update a paragraph to say that an installation can be completed only if the partitioning isn't customized.)

Maybe I read this wrong but it seems correct to me. Your partitioning is not complete/correct so you have to change it. I don't read in the text that we have set the partial partitioning from the KS. I understand that it is change of behavior, however, from my understanding it wasn't documented / supported feature even before. In general we are choosing safe path for future. The partitioning is still changing and there is a lot which can go wrong this way.

What do you think Jan? Should we make this explicit in the documentation?

I agree with Jirka.

1) If the partitioning is not fully specified in the kickstart file, we cannot really support showing partially-defined partitioning from the kickstart file in the custom partitioning spoke.
2) If the partitioning is fully specified in the kickstart file, then it's not required to enter the storage spoke at all. If the user enters the spoke, then the same as 1) applies here - we cannot support showing the partitioning defined in the kickstart file.

So, documentation should be extended and mention that entering spokes that are complete (were specified in the kickstart file) could lead to resetting their configurations. The users should only enter the spokes that require any action.

The documentation to update is here:
https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterprise_linux/8/html-single/performing_an_advanced_rhel_installation/index#kickstart-file-format_kickstart-script-file-format-reference

"Items that are not required can be omitted. Omitting..."

Hello, this bugzilla was created based on a support ticket I opened.  The behavior we would like to see retained (as it was in RHEL 7 and even some early RHEL 8 editions) is to have the *fully specified* custom partitioning maintained in the GUI as a starting point for end-users to further customize.

In my experience, if the end-user stays out of the partitioning part of the installation GUI, the custom kickstart partitioning works just fine so I can only assume it's fully specified and compliant.  However, if for example the end-user wants to make /var a bit larger in the GUI, the fully specified kickstart partitioning gets reset with default partitioning.