Roberto C. Sanchez wrote:
On Thu, Jun 09, 2005 at 03:21:57PM +0100, Graham Smith wrote:
When I first tried out the new installer yes I did read what documentation was
available (the version of the installer I used was a pretty early release so I
thought it would be worth mugging up on it) but I admit that the couple of
times I have used it recently (in the last month) I didn't read the
documentation before diving in.
While it would be nice to live in a world where everyone sat down and read all
the documentation before proceeding few of us actually have time to do that.
IIRC the problem was that the various different pseudo partitions and their
interaction with real partitions wasn't very well explained. I think I was also
confused about whether or not I could boot off a LVM partition.
That is all explained in the LVM-HOWTO. Sorry, but LVM is an advanced
tool and concept. Jumping in without reading documentation is not
really a good idea. That is sort of like complaining becuase you can't
get your C++ program to compile when you haven't bothered to at least
read a book on it.
While I would like to submit a bug report it would be of little use now as it
was to long ago for me to remember exactly what was wrong and I didn't take
notes at the time. Hopefully there is someone from the installer group reading
this thread.
What would have been nice was a
I-want-to-use-LVM-but-I-can't-be-chuffed-to-learn-about-it-right-now-so-just-give-me-something-sensible
button. But hey we can't have everything we want.
The problem with LVM s that there is no "sensible" default. It is very
dependent on your hardware and other configuration options. There are
so many permutations that would not be feasible to do that. It is a
little different with standard partitioning because the only decision to
be made for a normal user is size. With LVM it depends on whether you
want your root on LVM, if you are or are not using RAID and various
other things.
-Roberto
I agree that LVM is complex, of that there is no doubt, but I completely
disagree that there isn't a sensible default for a good portion of the
machines it's installed on. The installer already detects free space and
asks if it should install Debian in to it. Why can't it just ask another
question along the lines of "would you like me to set up LVM in this
space?".
I fully realize that this wouldn't be good enough for everyone because
it doesn't take into account raid arrays or exotic set-ups so there will
always be a need to control all aspects of the set-up. For the average
workstation, however, with just one HD that may also contain one other
OS (which you have to agree is a common machine) there has to be a
sensible default. If you don't believe me just imagine the default set
to whatever you would use in that situation - you obviously know a lot
about this topic so you will likely choose something that is pretty good.
Just because something is complex doesn't mean that people who don't
_fully_ understand it shouldn't be able to use it. That is like saying
that you can't drive a car unless you can strip and rebuild the engine.
Graham
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