(feel free to jump over the social issues at the beginning. There are technical issues at the end) > > Please do not overflate bug severities > > I don't. I was choosing the one that best matched what I experienced. I'm afraid it doesn't fit. "important" severity qualify bugs that "has a major effect on the usability of a package, without rendering it completely unusable to everyone". As the installer is mostly aimed at installing Debian on new systems with free space on the hard disk, I'm having hard times understanding why not being possible to install on existing empty filesystems can be said to be "having a major effect on the usability". > > Please do not insult free software developers when you have not > > contributed yourself to the development (even if you have, this is > > rude behaviour). > > Thank you, oh Holy Free Software Developers (TM) to save the world. > I was almost expecting a reaction like that which only shows how > pretentious some people within the movement have grown to become. Nope. If you expect people to spend time helping you solving the issues you are experiencing and figure out the problems you're facing, starting by saying that their work is like crap is not the best way to begin. Consideration is always appreciated when talking about volunteer work. Either in free software or in real life: have you noticed that only one personal answer came to your bug report (mine)? This is not what usually happens, especially with detailed bug reports like yours. Just look at Frans Pop message which closed you installation report. Frans, besides being the D-I release manager, often takes care answering installation reports as friendly as possible and with as much care as possible....here he simply closed it with a very short (but correct) explanation. Knowing him as I know him, I can tell you he has been hurted by your way to explain things. > > This only risks to make us ignore your remarks and > > send them to the waste bin. > > What's this: Are you threatening me with the open refusal to talk > about your organization's software ? I can take the ``risk'', no > worries. Our "organisation" is a volunteer organization. I'm explaining you that what I (and probably other D-I developers) didn't like the way you reported the issue you experienced. Hopefully for you, someone else would maybe not care about your tone and would try to understand deeper than I did the issue you're reporting and check whether we have solutions for this (we actually don't have solutions as there is no problem..:-))). > > obviously a deep expert of these thigns and choose to load the > ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ > > This probably needs a bit of a deeper explanation. What do you > expect people who take the ``expert'' route to Debian installation > to be ? Recently converted PeeCee power lusers that claim to be > experts in the magic black art of BIOS command editing ? Well, I assume that users who want to install Debian on a system where they previously created the partitions and filesystems *are* experts, yes. That's the point. > Firstly, the only menu presenting me with options to load packages > did not contain any of the above. Secondly, partitions are already > there including filesystems. Why would I want to invoke a partitioner > then ? Also, at which point exactly does the installer allow me to do > what I described ? I wasted hours to try every option presented in the > menu. Irrespective of what I selected the installer bombed me back and > insisted on partitioning the disk which had already been done elsewhere > including filesystem creation. I am certainly no expert in the debian > installer code (since I have never had the chance to have a look at it) > nor do I aspire to become one given the overloaded politics associated > with the organization. Well, I'm afraid you probably missed a bit of partman features, then, especially the one that allows users to re-use existing partitions. Let's assume your have prepared the first hard disk partition with an existing filesystem, say ext3. When presented with the main partitioning screen, just go to this partition, hit Enter on it. You'll be presented with options to use on this partition, one being "what to do" with it (sorry, not having the installer handy right now). Just choose it, assign it a mount point and here you are.... > > because we don't want to guarantee that the installed system will work > > if these filesystems already contain data > > So you _did_ mean populated filesystems, right ? I was never talking > about such, however. OK, then, empty filesystems. While I don't really see the point in preparing filesystems before installing, the above should allow you to do what you intend. What seems to confuse you is that the step that allows this is the "Partition hard disks" step while you already partitioned hard disks. I understand that, in your case, the partitioning and the filesystem creation are very distinct steps. However, in the most common case, they are highly mixed together....which explains that they are grouped in the same menu entry. So, what remains at the end is a usability issue in partman. You weren't able to find the right way to do what you intended to do. This is unfortunately a recurrent issue with partman: it is highly modular code but small usability issues are numerous and many things are not always obvious to users. *that* is a real issue, yes.
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