I keep forgetting how brittle anaconda is ...

… until I need to use it. Anaconda is the Redhat/Fedora installer. It purports to be a reasonable installation tool. But it has a number of interesting issues. Some of these issues make installs … well … exciting. I’ve taken to the philosophy of absolute minimum time spent in anaconda. Call this defensive installation. Anaconda will toss fatal errors, with no hope of recovery … unless you want to try and debug some obscure python … Back in the SGI days, I wrote an installer that largely worked around the SGI installer. The SGI installer had issues. That was putting it nicely. It couldn’t do what we needed it to do, and the developers had zero interest in adding in the functionality we needed. At this point in time, I am getting to the point where I am wondering if anaconda is worth engineering out of the install process. If I spend 10+ hours working around its bugs for a 10 minute install … Ugh.