[ On Friday, December 3, 2004 at 23:43:03 (-0500), der Mouse wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: sysinst problems
>
> You apparently consider maintaining non-overlapping partitions to be
> reason enough outweigh the inconvenience of keeping notes elsewhere.
> I don't.  We disagree.  That doesn't make either of us wrong - not that
> that necessarily says what TRT for sysinst to do is in this case.

Yes, but the point where our views come to clash is where you ask for an
option to turn off the sanity checks in a tool which has as one of its
primary goals the job of doing sanity checks, or at least of doing
things in such a way that they're guaranteed to come out safe and sane.

I know you're capable of maintaining your own dangerous magic tricks but
when you suggest that everyone should have an "I know better than the
software author" switch to turn off sanity checks preventing dangerous
magic, especially in a tool designed to enforce sanity and conformity,
well that's where I do think you're wrong.

The "Right Thing(tm)" for sysinst to do is to make it easy for experts
and non-experts alike to create safe and sane and maintainable (by
others) configurations.  Sysinst should not cater to creating unsafe or
broken configurations -- on the contrary it should strive to always
prevent such things from happening whether by accident or by intention.
Nobody forces the expert to use sysinst if and when that person wants to
break the rules that define "safe and sane" for the majority.  The
expert should know how to do what he or she needs without using sysinst.

Sysinst should not have a "turn off the sanity checks" feature either
because it cannot know when its user really does know what they are
doing and such a feature is just an invitation to get those who only
think they know what they're doing into trouble.  E.g. sysinst doesn't
let you change the whole disk partition(s) (and arguably disklabel
shouldn't by default either).  It's fine to give the expert some rope,
but it is not fine to force ropes with nooses ready tied in them upon
all those who have chosen to use a "rope avoidance" tool.  As an expert
you can take away some of the "rope avoidance" features of your version
of sysinst if you should so choose.

Now if you have an argument showing that some "safe and sane for the
majority" test is not valid or correct, then that's something we should
debate with the sysinst maintainers.  :-)

-- 
						Greg A. Woods

+1 416 218-0098                  VE3TCP            RoboHack <woods@robohack.ca>
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