Bug#217503: Evil autopartkit should _NEVER_ _NEVER_ try to overwrite an unknown partition table
On Tue, Oct 28, 2003 at 06:55:35PM +0100, Gaudenz Steinlin wrote:
> Am Sam, den 25.10.2003 schrieb Sven Luther um 11:29:
> > 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.
> I know that partitioner is broken for ppc at the moment, because of the
> wrong path to archdetect (fixed in CVS).
Ok, nice to hear. I am still wondering if me using an alternative
libparted is causing problems too or not, but i will send my definitive
stuff upstream soon, and make an NMU of parted also then, since i don't
see parted's maintainer moving much, altough there is a patch for it in
the BTS. I would like someone to test my new libparted packages with the
partitioner, to see if it will work. It should.
> To really trak down the problem it would be usefull to have some more
> information. Did you ever see the "This will destroy your data!"
> warning? Autopartkit sould always show that at least.
Sure, but this is also the message shown by every partition table
handling program, and thus it is not enough. That said, since the
refreshing of the screen was also broken, i may have missed some of the
things.
> There's an other bug that autopartkit and partconf-mkfstab both provide
> "created-fstab". We should find a way to avoid showing autopartkit as an
> option to only create the fstab. I don't know if partconf-mkfstab is
> able to create an fstab if partitions are made with autopartkit. If
> that's possible we could drop fstab creation from autopartkit.
I still think that the real problem is in the modularity of
debian-installer. It is all nice to have a bunch of modules be used and
have each provide a menu entry, but how do you guarantee structure and
coherence of the entries ? I would like that someone (maybe me, but i am
maybe not the best placed for it) made a analysis of what is really
supposed to happen in the install process, and how the tasks are
supposed to follow each others. I can make a begining of UML diagrams
for it, if you like, altough i am not really aware of all the
debain-installer details.
> > 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.
> Probably there shoulb be a test for supported partition tables in
> "isinstallable" which fails if the default partition table for the arch
> is not supported by parted.
Yep.
Friendly,
Sven Luther
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