Bug#739824: partman-efi: The term "EFI boot partition" is non-standard and adds to community confusion
Package: partman-efi
Severity: normal
Dear Maintainer,
The partman-efi package refers to the EFI System Partition (ESP) as an "EFI
boot partition." The latter name is non-standard; AFAIK, it's used *only* in
partman-efi and tools derived from it, such as Ubuntu's ubiquity. It's
therefore potentially confusing to users, who may wonder how (or even if) the
"EFI boot partition" relates to the ESP.
Unfortunately, this problem is pretty widespread. The EFI standards documents
all use the term "EFI System Partition" or "UEFI System Partition." Although
the acronym "ESP" is in common use, it doesn't appear in the EFI spec. GParted
and parted identify an ESP as having its "boot flag" set, which is a phenomenal
fail on a user interface level -- but that's not the point of this bug report.
My own GPT fdisk (gdisk) uses the term "EFI System" (with "partition" being
implicit). Users often refer to the "EFI partition" -- see for instance
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UEFI.
As somebody who communicates with users in forums, I find that there's a lot of
confusion about the ESP because of the number of unique names that are being
used to refer to the same thing. Hence this bug report: If Ubiquity simply
changes "EFI boot partition" to "EFI System Partition," one source of confusion
and frustration will be eliminated.
Note that I've also filed a bug report (#1283493) against Ubuntu's ubiquity on
this issue.
-- System Information:
Debian Release: 7.4
APT prefers stable-updates
APT policy: (500, 'stable-updates'), (500, 'stable')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Kernel: Linux 3.2.0-4-amd64 (SMP w/1 CPU core)
Locale: LANG=en_US.utf8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.utf8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
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