On Fri, May 30, 2025 at 12:11:44PM +0200, Pascal Hambourg wrote:
On 17/04/2025 at 21:51, Colin Watson wrote:libparted wrongly detects ext4 without journal as ext2 instead of ext4.(...)This bug affects the debian installer partitioning tool, partman, which relies on libparted to detect partition filesystem types. partman accepts to use such ext4 partition (without formatting it) only as ext2, then tries and fails to mount it as ext2 because of incompatible features.Note: this is not a theoretical bug, it was reported by an affected D-I user in #debian-boot IRC channel.
If it's a non-trivial bug, why did you file it as Severity: minor? https://www.debian.org/Bugs/Developer#severities - "a problem which doesn't affect the package's usefulness, and is presumably trivial to fix". It's usually for things like typos.
Please can you summarize the real-world situation in which this came up? To me this seems like a very niche sort of situation, but if you could actually explain it then that might help.
Upstream reviewed the patch and intends to merge it soon [1] but I guess it is already too late for trixie release.[1] <https://alioth-lists.debian.net/pipermail/parted-devel/2025-May/005930.html>A plan B for trixie release is to add a workaround in partman-base to double-check the filesystem type with blkid or other available tool when the filesystem detected by parted_server is ext2.
I don't think it makes sense to resort to plan B. Either it should be fixed in parted or it should just be put off until forky. My question is whether it's worth fixing in trixie at all (never mind a bookworm point release) given what so far has been very sparse information about its actual real-world impact.
-- Colin Watson (he/him) [cjwatson@debian.org]