From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041107 Firefox/1.0 Description of problem: During the normal flow of operation for anaconda, the user is asked an enormous list of questions, from disk partitioning, to network settings, to root passwords, to firewall settings, etc. Only after this list of questions has been asked and answered, does anaconda actually try to perform actual operations like disk formatting, etc. In the primary use case, this is not a problem. However, as soon as an error condition is present, anaconda bombs out with an unrecoverable message (usually the only option given being the extremely unhelpful and time wasting "reboot and start the entire process from scratch" option). What anaconda should do instead is perform the action at hand as soon as possible after the user has specified the information. For example, directly after the partition tables are specified, the disk should be formatted immediately. Errors will be reported immediately, the the user can be given the option of pressing "back", possibly fixing the error and trying again without wasting time. Doing it this way will save the user from going through the lengthy process of selecting packages, only to find their selection lost entirely when an unrecoverable error occurs, and will vastly improve the end user experience from the highly unpleasant experience it is now. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): Fedora Core 3 disk 1 How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: xxx Additional info:
Except that users also get data irrecoverably erased before the last minute. Destructive changes such as partitioning _must_ not be done until the user has gone through all the steps and is certain that they want to proceed to avoid realizing as you select packages that, eg, you need to grab something from one of the partitions you're choosing to format. You may see it as a flaw, but _many_ people see it as a positive.
The user specified the partitions to format. It is reasonable to pop up a confirmation message saying "I am about to format these partitions, are you sure" (as I recall it already does). When this partition format happens makes no difference to the safety of the data, it becomes a usability issue. The fact that anaconda is a) so unreliable, and b) has no method whatsoever of saving "state" information so that future attempts to restart the install process are not met with the same 100 questions over again means that the chances are very high the user is in for a very frustrating experience. I have been tasked in the past to fix a website that asked for 5 pages of information, and then bombed out irretrievably on final submit if an error occured on page 1. The website needed to be fixed because it had virtually no end users, all of whom complained bitterly about the time wasted between the cause of an error and the error message. Redhat would do well to learn from this basic design mistake - our next solution to the anaconda problem was to trash Fedora and install Debian - not what a commercial company like Redhat wants to see happen with it's products.
Use kickstart.