Somebody claiming to be Henning Brauer wrote: > * David Vasek <va...@fido.cz> [2012-03-07 18:56]: > > >what about this > > > > > >Use (W)hole disk or (E)dit the MBR? [edit] > > > > > >while the OP did make a mistake, he could modify the default to be > > >edit the MBR. so he would be forced to pay attention while staring at > > >the partition table. i would be paying attention to the instructions. > > > > > >stuart is right, there's a point where if you add confirmations, where > > >would you stop? > > > > Not confirmations, but saner defaults. No default value here is > > another option - it doesn't take from precious floppy size. > > see, I'm really not in the "OpenBSD is perfect, defend it at all cost" > boat. there is a lot of stuff we can (and in many cases, do) improve. > and the outside view is valuable, it is only natural that we, hacking > on and using OpenBSD for years, become somewhat blind for some of > these things because we're so used to it. > > however, I absolutely believe our default IS sane here. > > from my personal use case 'whole disk' covers 100%. and I am confident > this is true for way over 90% of openbsd installs - even for those > running multiple OSes, isn't some sort of (bad) virtualization the > common way today? > > I thought about the wording. In the context of an Operating System > install, isn't "use whole disk" utterly clear? so i came to the > conclusion that things are fine as is. > > no matter what we do, we cannot work around a user who doesn't pay > attention to the text on his screen - especially while installing an > OS, writing to disk, working with the artition table, the risk there > is utterly obvious, you gotta at least pay attention. >
It seems that enter was pushed (in this case) in an effort to scroll up. This was a bad decision on his part - but it is one way people have done such things in the past. I know I have run into problems myself because I tend to throw a 'ls' at every single cursor I see. Sometimes causing other problems. It seems the user knew that his whole disk would be affected, although he did not realize how affected his machine would be. Likely changing the words used would not solve any problem. I like Whole disk being the default, simply because it usually works for me personally. The big question is, is this problem one that is common? Will this solution solve the problem? The problem is that someone did not really spend much time making sure he had the write setting, since he thought he could fix it if he got it wrong. Happens all the time I understand. Moving the default to something else will still have people make those mistakes (I don't want to talk about the time I tried to learn fdisk through trial and error), and it will make things harder for a very important group (the devs). To date I think the best solution is to put a more READ THE FAQ on the download page, it doesn't affect the installer - but does warn the Linux convert that we're not handholding here. > -- > Henning Brauer, h...@bsws.de, henn...@openbsd.org > BS Web Services, http://bsws.de, Full-Service ISP > Secure Hosting, Mail and DNS Services. Dedicated Servers, Root to Fully > Managed > Henning Brauer Consulting, http://henningbrauer.com/ > --Sean
