Re: partman review
On Fri, Feb 27, 2004 at 01:35:47PM -0500, Joey Hess wrote:
> This is my little review of partman. I looked at it in depth and tried
> everything. Please consider this constructive criticism, I think partman
> is a fine tool overall.
>
> * It really does need a progress bar at startup. It does seem that fair
> bit of the delay is disk-bound and not cpu-bound.
Mmm, how long is this delay ? Maybe the fact that it doesn't appear to
be working on my 1GHz G4 powerpc pegasos is because of that. But then, i
would consider no response whatsoever from the box during various
minutes as something severly broken. ps shows something is running, but
this is the only feedback i get. I have not yet tried letting it run
though.
Also, maybe this is related to a partition table selection problem ?
> * If I tell it to create an empty partition table on the device, it defaults
> to a bsd partition table, which is not a good default. I do not think the
> list of partitoon table types should be displayed at all at high priority.
> Also, the list of partition tables is entitled "Type for the new label:",
> with no explanation. This is confusing jargon. This question also exposes a
> bug in debconf; the Go Back and Continue buttons overlap.
Yeah, it should be a arch/subarch dependant thingy. Also, in some case,
the hardware can use different partition table formats, but this may
have influence on what other OS you can run on the OS together. Maybe a
possibility to add a per subarch information screen would be nice.
Also, The same rationale would go for choosing partition types and such.
> * Only ext2, swap, fat are avilable as filesystem types. What about ext3,
> reiserfs, and xfs? Our users will demand these. I see partman-ext3 and
> partman-auto on the CD, and I think this is a priority problem that is
> preventing them from being installed by default. Reiserfs and xfs should be
> added.
libparted cannot (yet) create ext3. And reiserfs seems to have been
broken in the past, not sure though. I don't know about xfs. But then,
external tools can be used.
> * I cannot seem to figure out how to use partman to create extended
> partitions, at all.
Don't forget that not all partition tables need logical partitions and
such, some don't have this brokeness :))
Friendly,
Sven Luther
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