Bug 660754

The interactive command presented us with no end of troubles, so it has been removed.  Sorry.

There should at least be an error if "interactive" is specified in the kickstart file.  I had a hard drive that was erroneously reformatted because Anaconda proceeded through the drive initialization without asking for confirmation.  I think "interactive" should cause a fatal error in the installer.

It's currently marked as deprecated, which means it has no effect but does not raise an error.  You will see a warning about it in the logs though.  Once a release or two has passed, I will remove it entirely and then it will cause installation to halt.

Hopefully not too many people will lose data in the meantime.

The online documentation has not been updated to reflect the missing "interactive" support, in fact it isn't even tagged as deprecated.
http://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/Fedora/14/html/Installation_Guide/s1-kickstart2-options.html

Furthermore "deprecated" means that the functionality is still there, but will be removed in the future, not that it already has been removed! The current state is not "deprecated", but "removed".

Let me add that "interactive" was extremely helpful. End users and admins could see and edit what the kickstart produced and this can even help disclose more core bugs than a botched install which needs to be analysed post-mortem. And no, neither is autostep a sane substitute (I do want to check whether my %packages selection makes sense and possible add something during that install), nor can one argue that the setup is still interactive, as it will stop if anaconda is missing something - users/admins want to check the default values, too.

Thankfully with RHEL6 interactive is still alive, but I wonder how many bug reports would be raised if this change had been made to RHEL6? And whether RHEL7 will need a resurrection of interactive?

This change may ease on the anaconda development team resources, but lengthens the development cycles for large scale deployments of Fedora. I actually make extensive use of non-interactive cobbler driven site deployments, but for getting at that productive stage I do use "interactive" a lot. IMHO it is a regression and should be fixed instead of removed. Please reconsider adding interactive back to Fedora's anaconda. Thanks!

Sorry, but the interactive command will not be coming back.  It simply makes too much of a mess in everything in anaconda and in my opinion never should have been added in the first place.  It breaks most every assumption we can make about what a kickstart installation really means.  This is most certainly not a regression.

I'm personally not asking to bring it back.  Please just make it die with an error instead of potentially destroying data.

> I'm personally not asking to bring it back.  Please just make it die with an
> error instead of potentially destroying data.

Yeah, this is a good point.  I have marked it as such in pykickstart so this will be taken care of for F15.