Re: bts reassign 878722 partman-auto

On Fri, Nov 10, 2017 at 12:50 PM, Cyril Brulebois <kibi@debian.org> wrote:

Nicholas D Steeves <nsteeves@gmail.com> (2017-11-10):
> 1) get a list of disks
> 2) identify the disk used by the installer
> 3) exclude the disk found at #2

How do you do 2?

Last I touched this, nothing obvious appeared in d-i to know what the
installer was booted from. ISTR having suggested at the time that
bootloaders could set something to help d-i figure out where it booted
from, but I don't think anything happened in this area since then.

OK, This Is a crazy Idea, but . . . When generating Installer images, they get various readmes and so on, and I believe one of them includes version information, so we can parse that file for the version number, compare it with the one in the initrd (to be added). This handles the common cases of cd (overkill as cds are read only) and USB (presumably most important), but fails on net-install (where it is not needed). We can have installer loader scripts copy the version info file to mark the drives they are using which should catch most of the rest of the cases.

A variation of this is to have a pseudo random token in the version file which is passed on the command-line to the installer instead of modifying the initrd. This has the advantage that we could have special case values for net-boot to skip the scan. (ie if the token was a hexadecimal value but the special case was the word netboot.

both cases make identifying and protecting partitions used to store archives and iso images easy by manually placing the version file.

> 4) present modified list as target disks for installation
> 5) unless in expert mode, where a user could use one partition of a
> disk as the installation source and another partition as the
> installation target. I'm not sure how important #5 is, but maybe some
> users want to be able to do this?

KiBi.

Ben Hildred

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