replacing the Startup Disk Creator

[Mathieu Trudel-Lapierre]

Le 2015-09-17 12:44, Nio Wiklund a écrit :
[...]
> I will forward your comments and tips to the persons at the Ubuntu
> Forums who reported the bugs and bad features :-)
> 
> More than four years has passed with severe bugs, that make the SDC fail
> in many cases. I think you have had enough chances to fix it, and it
> would be better to use another tool instead. That way you can spend your
> time improving other things.
> 
> I can only suggest a change, and supply information and opinion about
> the alternative tools. If a majority of the deciding forum does not want
> to replace the SDC, that's it. We can continue to help people at the
> Ubuntu Forums to install other tools in order to make USB pendrives
> bootable with Ubuntu.
> 

I've seen the forum survey on this matter already. The trouble is,
unetbootin is complicated (does it do persistence correctly?).
multisystem (although I am not familiar with it) is likely to be
complicated enough too given it's purpose. I don't know about mkusb, but
the UI looks clunky at first glance.

Disks requires too many clicks to reach the right interface, and
therefore would need documentation for new users, although it seems like
it could well do the trick (also, doesn't do persistence).

And let's not talk about dd, which is very dangerous for a new user to
use. It's far too likely for someone to nuke their hard drive using it.

These are just the top options from the poll, with 31 voters. It's not
nearly representative enough to make a decision.

In the end, we're already using usb-creator, and maintaining it, and the
code itself is very approachable. I have no idea who would volunteer to
maintain an alternative to usb-creator either. I think the price of
replacing it for the moment far outweighs the cost of fixing the few
bugs it has to make it work well for everyone.

As for a timeline, I would like to propose something:

It's far too late this cycle to change tools, and it seems ambitious to
me to change it for a LTS when it mostly works -- let's try to fix the
bugs between now and the next LTS, and revisit afterwards if there is a
need to change. In the meantime, this will allow time for a proper
proposal to be made, and for any fixes to be done for an alternative to
be rock solid. I'm reasonably certain that if everyone pitches in to
report the bugs and propose patches if they can, we can fix the top
issues easily.


-- 
Mathieu Trudel-Lapierre <mathieu-tl at ubuntu.com>
Freenode: cyphermox, Jabber: mathieu.tl at gmail.com
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