Colin Watson <cjwatson@debian.org> (2009-06-19): > The installer should have warned you about the fact that installing over > an unclean (unformatted) target is likely to break, and this is one of > the ways in which it will break. Maybe it needs to warn harder, or > attempt to clear out dpkg's configuration or something. FTR, base-installer.templates has: | _Description: Proceed with installation to unclean target? | The target file system contains files from a past installation. These files | could cause problems with the installation process, and if you proceed, | some of the existing files may be overwritten. > Ubuntu has a scheme involving clearing a reasonable selection of > "system" directories if you try to install over an unformatted > filesystem, in order to make it easier for people to reinstall while > keeping /home and /srv and so on. It's had some teething troubles, but > it's reasonably mature now and might be worth considering. What do we do? Try to get Ubuntu's stuff into Debian, or possibly make the wording quoted above stronger? (If it were just me, I'd go with either the latter, or maybe just closing this bug report as user error.) Mraw, KiBi.
Attachment:
signature.asc
Description: Digital signature