Bug#236937: acknowledged by developer (thank you for your installation report)

[Bram Senders <bram@luon.net>]

On Fri, Mar 12, 2004 at 07:33:07PM -0800, Joey Hess wrote:
> First of all your installation report claims you installed beta2, but I
> can tell from your report that that was not the case. If you could
> explain to me why you thought that the image you downloaded was a beta 2
> image, I'd be interested to know -- it was really a current daily build,
> which we appreciate you testing.

I though it was beta 2 because the heading "Beta 2" on the
debian-installer site referred to the Installation HOWTO.  Although no
reference to beta 2 is made in the Installation HOWTO, it seems to make
a clear distinction between daily builds and non-daily builds.

1. ``The other kinds of images, including floppy images are in the Debian
     archive, in the main/installer-<arch> directories. For example:
     ftp://ftp.debian.org/debian/dists/unstable/main/installer-i386/current/
     images/''

2. ``Daily builds of all non-ISO debian-installer images, including
     floppy images and initrd's are available --
     for i386:    http://people.debian.org/~sjogren/d-i/images/daily/''

This seems to suggest---at least to me---that since the second category
explicitly mentions to be daily builds, that the first category is *not*
daily builds.  That's why I thought I wasn't installing a daily build.
Congratulations on fooling me---it seemed stable enough to let me
believe it was a beta ;)

> You caught us at a transition point to a new partitining system. Yes, we
> know it's a bit slow. It does support XFS now. Some of the
> inconsistencies you noticed are because the old partitioning system was
> still available (just in case).
> 
> The problem you ran into with the grub install hang is a grub/xfs bug.
> grub accesses the disk directly, and gets confused because xfs has not
> synced its buffers to disk. The new paritioner, while allowing you to
> use XFS, takes care the insist that you put /boot on a non-xfs
> partition, to avoid this problem. We're still looking for a better
> solution.

I hope that it is at least possible to not install a bootloader and thus
be able to have /boot as XFS too.  At least, installing GRUB manually
from a GRUB boot floppy does not give me any trouble.

> Thanks for your installation report.

Thanks for your reaction.  It's nice to see that these installation
reports are being valued :)

Bram Senders