Re: Booting Debian/testing fails
On Sat, Feb 03, 2007 at 08:03:02AM -0500, hendrik@topoi.pooq.com wrote:
> On Sat, Feb 03, 2007 at 12:57:09AM -0500, Kevin Mark wrote:
> > On Fri, Feb 02, 2007 at 08:40:02PM -0500, Douglas Allan Tutty wrote:
> > > > > wouldn't consider a *N*X are doing so. And they're not prepared.
> > > >
> > > > so in other words... its a good thing!
> > > >
> > >
> > > Yes. It tells us that our documentation isn't up to their needs.
> > >
> > > Doug.
> > Well, I'd say that the value of 'their' has progressively been changing
> > to be an ever more less expeirenced group of users.
>
> Well, I've been using Linux for five years -- at least -- I've lost
> count -- with various distros (starting frome when slackware was just
> starting to be installed from CDROM instead of floppies), have settled
> on Debian, and are tempted by Gentoo. I don't find the documentation up
> to *my* needs. Or else maybe I stil don't know where to find it.
>
> For example, where do you find details on why rescue mode, swapped hard
> drives (/dev/hda <-> /dev/hdc) when I asked it to start a shell in the
> context of my root partition but not when I asked it to start a shell in
> the installer context? In fact running fdisk /dev/hda in the root
> context showed me a perfect partition table for /dev/hdc, except that
> all the partitions were labelled as being on /dev/hda.
>
> Now I know the boot-loaders have provisions for swapping hard-drive
> letters. But why were they invoked?
>
> This is the kind of detail that needs to be documented. And access to
> wource code is no longer a solution, even for experienced programmers --
> there's just too much undocumented context for each piece of the
> hundred-million-odd lines of code that constitute Debian that that's
> only practical for specialists in the particular subsystem under
> investigation.
>
> I've considered switching to Gentoo, because some of their advocates say
> their distribution is strong on documentation, but I suspect that they
> mey not be a lot better.
Do you need to know the _why_ of that, or would you have liked a
heads-up and what to do about it?
The _why_ may be a complicated technical answer usable only to those
working on coding the installer (or the kernel). The
what-to-do-about-it should be simple for someone who has dealt with it
to explain.
Doug.
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