Bug#393919: partman-crypto: should provide separate short description

[Max Vozeler <max@nusquama.org>]

Hi Frans,

On Wed, Oct 18, 2006 at 03:21:40PM +0200, Frans Pop wrote:
> Currently the same string is used for both listing encrypted
> partitions as devices and as a short description after the
> encrypted partition itself.
> 
> For the short description the current string is too long which
> leads to it being cut off as can be seen in: >
> http://people.debian.org/~fjp/d-i/partman-crypto_cut-string.png on
> the line for "SCSI1 (0,0,0); #5".
> 
> It would be good to use a separate string for the short
> description, maybe just "crypto", just like is done for swap.

The reason I originally included $(humandev $dev) in there was to
make it possible for users to associate the encrypted device with
the "backing" device. For dm-crypt, this is partially obsolete as we
choose the name of the encrypted volume based on the backing device,
e.g. sda5_crypt. The string "sda5" never appears in the interface
though, so this still requires users to think: "Ok, partition #5 of
SCSI1 (0,0,0) is likely to be sda5".

This is more difficult for loop-AES encrypted devices as we cannot
choose an arbitrary name, but only /dev/loop[0-n]. Without the
humandev string, there is currently no way to tell which encrypted
device is associated with which "real" device. We have the same
problem with LVM and RAID devices, which don't show which belongs to
which, but in case of encrypted devices, there are likely to be
multiple, so I think associating them is more important.

I've seen this problem during installs in german locale (#381968),
and this is really something that could be improved. Overall though,
I think having at least a chance to associate the backing device
with the encrypted device is more important than having the minor
glitch of a cut-off string. IMHO of course. Ideally we could find a
generic way to make it possible for the user to tell which abstract
devices correspond to which real devices that can also be used for
LVM and RAID. I think that would be very useful. :-)

cheers,
Max