Sven Luther <luther@debian.org> writes:
> Package: autopartkit
> Version: 0.62
> Severity: critical
> Justification: causes serious data loss
>
> Ok, i am trying to make debian-installer work on the pegasos, and to my
> surprise, yesterday, autopartkit without really giving me the choice
> (but then, i might have missed something with the garbled console i
> got), just proceeded to overwrite my partition table and something
> started to format a partition. So no more powerpc kernel work, no more
> parted patches, no more changes to debian-installer. No more anything i
> had on that disk, which was not even the disk i was doing the
> installation tests on.
:(((((((((((((((((((((((((((((
> This should never never never happen like that, and the whole partition
> and disk touching thingy is utterly broken as is.
>
> It is also not only pegasos related, but will break on m68k/amiga as
> well as ppc/amiga, as well as all the not yet supported by libparted
> partition schemes.
>
> I see two solutions to this :
>
> 1) an NMU of libparted including my amiga patches, which are sitting
> in the BTS since almost a month now. This is only a partial solution
> though, as we would need to add at least probing code for _every_
> partition scheme around (not all that difficult to do). An upload of a
> new libparted may mean a recompilation of all the libparted using
> binaries, not sure though, it should not happen, as i don't modify the
> external representation, but ...
>
> 2) Some more rationale chosing of partitioning scheme based on
> arch/subarch detection. I notice that partitioner was first tried and
> failed, and then it got on to propose to mount partitions and such,
> and then it went on to autopartkit. This is broken. One thing that can
> be checked is, that despite libparted not recognizing the partition
> table type, the kernel _DOES_ know about it, so it should detect it
> and warn the user about this in big flashing letters. And something
> more flashy than the usual "Are you sure you want to erase this disk"
> thingy, since we _know_ that autopartkit is going to write over the
> existing partition table.
3) Get rid of the autopartition alltogether. Its severly broken for
anything but "I'm such a stupid user but I only want one linux", which
kind of excludes itself. People not able to partition themself usually
want to keep their windows.
> As i see it, the ideal way of handling this would be a coordinated
> effort of the different partitioning/formating tools available, which
> somehow shows the limits of the modular system.
>
> Ideally, we should have :
>
> We have a disk. It is either partitioned or not, we parse the
> /proc/partitions to see what the kernel thinks about it. We would need
> to load the partition table modules for this though.
>
> We do a libparted probe on the disk, to see if the partition table is
> recognized. If it is, then we can propose the user to choose either
> partitioner, autopartkit or parted. Ideally we should have some
> heuristic (arch/subarch related) for proposing also other tools. This
> should be one menu entry only, which would have something like
> submenus. I don't know if this is possible with the modular
> debian-installer, but until this is done, i don't consider
> debian-installer as releaseable, so if it not possible, we better work
> on it. If the kernel discovered a partition table on the disk, we also
> automatically propose to not change anything, and go on with it.
>
> If the kernel detects a partition table on the disk, but neither
> libparted nor the standalone partitioning tool is able to detect it,
> then we have a huge flashing warning about the fact. And something
> which should _not_ be comparable to the normal "are you sure" question
> currently used.
>
> Once one of the tools is choosen (or not) and the disk is partitioned,
> we go on with the filesystem creation stuff as usual.
>
> Like said, this is a critical bug report. In the current status
> debian-installer is totally unreleasable, and this should be fixed.
I would like to have a manual partitioner only but with a little
helper telling one what to do and a button to do what the helper said
(highlighted by default).
Partitioning and mounting should also be combined. The mountpoint of
partitions can easily be decided when creating them.
The Helper would first guide the user to creating some free space on a
harddisk by either deleting or resizing partitions or wipeing the
partition block (if none is found).
Then it would suggest creating a /, swap, /boot for some archs, usr,
var,... partitions of appropriate sizes. (It could create those
partition and let the user edit them before selecting finish to commit
them to harddisk, doesn't have to be a step by step tour)
I feel that partitioning is too important and too dangerous to let it
run unguided. The partitioner could show the partitions its going to
delete in red in one box and the partitions it will end up with in
another in normal.
MfG
Goswin