On the new anaconda

[AdamW]

Just wanted to highlight a very interesting post from Will Woods today:

https://ohjeezlinux.wordpress.com/20...retrospective/

it does a pretty good job (I think) of explaining why anaconda got rewritten, what got done and when (probably not when you think!), and why things will get better faster now we're done with it. So read it, newUI fans and haters!

[Demz3]

was a good read i thought.

[BBQdave]

After wrapping my mind around the hub and spoke approach to installation, no problems with F18 install.

Happily using solid stable F18, and Thanks for the link AdamW

[Dan]

We also spent a full year doing lots of prototyping and design work, all in public view, reaching out for feedback in any way we could think of - at one point, Máirín printed out the mockups and taped them to the wall of the office so passers-by could comment on it.

So ... just how public was it? One wonders how many people strolled by and saw it. Twenty? Fifty?

I'm guessing not much more than a half dozen or so who really looked, and had the talent to know what they were looking at and for. But I suppose that does qualify as public. Maybe even just public enough. Lotsa insider baseball type feedback available there, anyway. But I all-too-well understand that getting opinions from outsider people who, "just don't understand the complexity of it all," would be a right proper PITA. They wouldn't or couldn't grasp the enormity of the issues involved without being fairly well immersed in it.

Except ... maybe not so much. Interesting people, experience and skills haunt the halls in here, too ... in and amongst the raw unwashed massive chaos that is the user community. (Please understand that's not a criticism. I would have been extremely reluctant to try something like that, too ... if I didn't suspect how much raw flippin' talent silently wanders through these forums on a daily basis.)

Seriously, I'm not kidding here. I think it's worth making the posts here that early in the processes. I think you might get some good stuff. And if you really do get nothing but the expected Bravo-Sierra, you can always just smile and walk away from it. But then nobody can/could ever claim it was done in a smoke filled room under a harsh interrogation light. Or, as the case may be, a small office deep in the bowels of an industrial building reeking of Red Bull, strong coffee and frayed nerves -- with walls randomly festooned with harried sketchwork. (And a few stuffed and mounted heads of former colleagues and unlucky subordinates. <....> )

But if you’re dead-set on keeping the old installer, or you think we’re a bunch of idiots who got the UI all wrong, well, that’s the beauty of Open Source: the code’s right here. Feel free to show us how it should be done! Enjoy! I look forward to seeing what you come up with!

Hell of a constructive way of asking for cooperative help he's got there. <....> But probably not too far from accurate.

If I had those sorts of skills, I wouldn't mind having a go at it. Although ... it seems to me it's actually finally coming together pretty well. Here's hoping that as it matures, it proves resilient enough to survive as far into antiquity as the old one did. <....>




Bottom line? I suspect that there are times when your job of trying to referee between hard headed developers and demanding and angry users wouldn't be worth a bucket of warm spit.

Thanks for hanging in there.

[mikee]

Why is there so much code bloat in F16/17?
Is that the systemd switchover?

[Demz3]

Originally Posted by mikee

Why is there so much code bloat in F16/17?
Is that the systemd switchover?

why would it be the " systemd switchover that caused the bloat" ?

[mikee]

Originally Posted by Demz3

why would it be the " systemd switchover that caused the bloat" ?

I was just trying to recall some of the major changes happening in F16/F17, so I admit this
was somewhat of a guess. Seems like the systemd stuff is involved in the boot process.

[Maryyy]

I mean, that hardstyle is killing my ears.

[AdamW]

mikee: it's not bloat; that graph isn't 'lines of code in the installers of each release', which I think you might be reading it as. It's 'in which release cycle were the lines of code in current anaconda master written?' - so what the graph's basically saying is a large amount of the current anaconda code was written during the F16 and F17 cycles. Will included it to make the point visually that we didn't just start work on newUI in the F18 cycle.

[AdamW]

dan: that line was just an example of how far we went to get feedback; that wasn't the _only_ way we tried to get feedback. Mo posted a long series of blog posts on the re-design, with lots of very detailed discussion of particular elements. She included mockups, and they actively took feedback from the comments on those posts into account. See http://blog.linuxgrrl.com/category/fedora/anaconda/ , and note that many of the posts have quite a lot of discussion in the comments, with Mo actively taking feedback there. The other members of the anaconda team occasionally posted stuff to their own blogs or linked to Mo's, but Mo's was NewUI Central. All the anaconda team and Mo are syndicated on planet fedora, so if you followed the planet, you'd have seen all those posts.

edit: on 'constructive help' - well, if you want to help improve the current design, then we're all ears; lots of changes have been made in response to F18 feedback. That line was specifically for the 'refuseniks' who just say 'it's bad! it's all terrible! it can't be fixed! we want the old one back!' - you can't really get 'co-operative help' from there. It'd be like the GNOME designers trying to work with the MATE maintainers on improving GNOME 3's design. It would not go to a good place for either party.

[Dan]

... It'd be like the GNOME designers trying to work with the MATE maintainers on improving GNOME 3's design. It would not go to a good place for either party.

And more the shame for it. Little constructive ever comes out of serious brainlock on either side.

From the movie The Hunt For Red October:

Captain Davenport: They're pinging away with their active sonar like they're looking for something, but nobody's listening.
Jack Ryan: What do you mean?
Captain Davenport: Well, they're moving at almost forty knots. At that speed, they could run right over my daughter's stereo and not hear it.

[bob]

I wonder how much better received the release would have been if pushed back to F19 rather than rushed to F18. Personally, I had zero problems with it, even with doing a custom install to handle my F17/Mint existing partitions.

But, in the end, this IS Fedora where we're supposed to go forward into uncharted waters. "Damn the torpedoes, full steam ahead!"

[JONOR]

And we’ve got plenty of improvements planned for the next release already.

Just what i wanted to read. Keep up the good work Will !
After a couple of crashes i still thought it was in better shape than the rawness of F16's Gnome3 (which is my benchmark in such matters ).

[joncr]

The hub-and-spoke approach is, for me, the biggest substantive improvement. If I botch something, or just need to change something, I can do that before I commit to the install. Old Anaconda assumed I moved through the install in a straight and unerring line. If, say, I realized I typoed my hostname, I was out of luck.

[Dan]

Sadly, I can say from very recent experience that typos in the hostname are still, in the end, subject to the possibly flawed screening process of the Mark IV eyeball. And I really don't think Anaconda can do much about that.

<....>