Re: [PATCH] Give more useful names to other bootable devices

[Will Woods <wwoods redhat com>]

On Mon, 2008-09-22 at 13:34 -1000, David Cantrell wrote:

> Perhaps, but my personal take on it is there is the do-I-care issue  
> and the technical issue.
> 
> For me, I don't care what is on a user's HFS or DOS partition.  Maybe  
> it's bootable, maybe it's not.  But it's not our problem.

Except when we set up bootloader config for the other OSes on the
system, as we do in anaconda:
http://wwoods.fedorapeople.org/screenshots/f10b-boot-config.png

I wonder what happens if you try to install Fedora on a system that's
already got Mac OS X and Windows dual-booting? Two "Other" entries,
identical except for the partition number? 

> The technical issue is we can't really make the assumption that all  
> bootable HFS partitions on ppc systems are MacOS X. 

What? Why not? Unless I've seriously misunderstood this part of booty,
that field is just a human-readable string that identifies the system
type.

Change it to "Mac OS" and we'll be right easily 95% of the time, and the
rest will be owned by hackers who are obviously competent enough to know
what HFS-based, non-Mac OS system they're dealing with.

>  I mean, it's  
> probably a safe guess, but it's not guaranteed.  The same with DOS  
> partitions.  We can't assume it's Windows.  The only way to know for  
> sure what's on those filesystems is to dig down in to them and see  
> what will boot from them, and then that brings in a whole set of  
> knowledge that isn't really part of anaconda.

...which is why this is a patch to booty, not anaconda.

If you want me to extend the patch to actually try to identify the OS
*for sure*, with version numbers and everything, that's fine. But that
seems like an awful lot of additional complexity to handle HFS-based
systems that *aren't* OS X or NTFS/FAT-based systems that *aren't*
Windows - especially when, once again, if we guess *wrong*, it's just an
incorrect label that the the user can correct.

I really think this is one of those lucky situations where we can guess
right 95% of the time, and when we guess wrong, the failure is harmless
and trivial to correct. Refusing to guess because of that 5% chance of
failure seems like a cop-out.

-w