Bug#217503: Evil autopartkit should _NEVER_ _NEVER_ try to overwrite an unknown partition table

[Sven Luther <sven.luther@wanadoo.fr>]

On Sun, Oct 26, 2003 at 07:48:50PM -0600, Steve Langasek wrote:
> On Sun, Oct 26, 2003 at 04:03:11AM +0100, Goswin von Brederlow wrote:
> > Steve Langasek <vorlon@netexpress.net> writes:
> 
> > > On Sun, Oct 26, 2003 at 02:17:37AM +0200, Goswin von Brederlow wrote:
> > > > 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.
> 
> > > You seem to be rather arrogantly overlooking the "I have five of these
> > > machines to build this week and partitions are so far down on my list of
> > > things to configure that I'll scream if I have to see cfdisk one more
> > > time" group.  This is not a question of not being able to partition,
> > > it's a question of by-hand partitioning being a waste of time for a
> > > sizable number of users.
> 
> > > With appropriate warnings about the destructive nature of partitioning,
> > > I believe the autopartitioner will be very useful.
> 
> > They would probably have empty harddisks to begin with.
> 
> > The partitioner would pop up suggesting the partitions the
> > autopartitioner would create now and their mountpoints and they only
> > have to select "finish" or "save changes".
> 
> > I would like to see the partitions suggested and adjustable by the
> > user instead on forcing it on him. This step realy destroys data so
> > the user should be aware of every partiton thats going to be destroyed
> > and what replaces them.
> 
> That defeats the purpose of an *auto*partitioner.  We already have an
> interface that does what you describe; it's the one that's universally
> regarded as newbie-hostile and generally tedious.

Well, friday, it proposed me partitioner, which was broken, and did
refuse to work, and autopartkit, which ate my disk. Nowhere did it fall
back to using a good old (newbie-hostile) tool, like parted or
amiga-fdisk. And i don't know if it is really newbie friendly to have
debian-installer eat the preinstalled system, i doubt newbies know of to
restaure their partition table by hand, and they may be unluck and have
the important data on the first partition that was wiped out in the
process.

But then, nobody really cares about that,

Friendly,

Sven Luther