two suggestions for anaconda-installer

[Maxert]

Hi folks,

I would like to suggest two very useful features for the anaconda installer. Since i would have used it, when it would be within the installer. I recently updated FC 12 to 13, but the upgrade broke my system completely :-( (no loginbox, no tty, but ssh worked).

I would suggest to add a special option to the upgrade process. Nearly everyone i know, has an empty USB-Drive/Networkdrive - which could be useful for a temprorary backup. Please add an option to backup and restore a system prior to upgrading it. Those who are interested in upgrading their system, can simply check a box, the upgrade will backup automatically the whole system, and run the upgrade process afterwards. When you now experience that the upgrade failed for some reason, you can simply use the restore-option to return to the old system, instead of spending days for emergency-recovery and re-configuration. Since you will always find something, you forgot about. This feature will help a lot of people to fall back, or find a time/solution when they are ready to do it. I had to work more than two days to recover all the data, which i would have saved, if i could backup/restore within the anaconda installer. But i had to lookup sort of things, like "how was that configured again?", "well what software was also installed".

Another thing would also be nice: not just save the image, but also save "rpm -qa" and backup it too, and tell anaconda to try to restore this set of packages, when installing a new distribution - with a defined feature set. So those sort of thing do not need to be done manually. I wrote a very basic skript for me, which compared a pre-install-pre-upgrade "rpm -qa", to the newly installed system, and then told me, what i forgot about. It removed all versioninformation of a package e.g. fc12, fc13, and major and minor version numbers and kept the package name, then i did some "cat", "sort" and "uniq" operations so that i could figure out, what was installed before and is still currently missing. I had to scroll through that list and then manually install the software, which was not within the basic desktop install. This would be a nice feature too.

regards
Maxim

[Hlingler]

Greetings Maxert:

And welcome to the Forum.

Please refer to the notice at the bottom of every page here: "FedoraForum.org is privately owned and is not directly sponsored by the Fedora Project or Red Hat, Inc." Please be aware that few Fedora developers monitor this forum. That being the case, you would be much better served to present your suggestions directly to the Fedora Project Staff - see the "Fedora Project Jump" feature at top right of every page.

Good Luck,
V

[Maxert]

Thank you, for this clarification and your Welcome, but i wont use their bug-system to submit bugs or features. ;-) We all have our borders in getting involved into projects. This will be the place where i want to publish this idea, Anyone who likes or dislike it, is allowed to spread it.

regards

[GoinEasy9]

Try the fedora developers mailing list:

devel@lists.fedoraproject.org
https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel

Folks here that want to share ideas, patches, fixes, suggestions....post to a place where the developers can give an answer. The user's forum is sort of like emerald city, the devs are behind the curtain, in the back, in the corner, in the dark.