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Re: Installers, fstab and swap.



On 04/13/2011 10:20 AM, Clement Lefebvre wrote:
 Hi Anthony,

live-installer (the installer we developed primarily for LMDE) doesn't use UUIDs yet. It refers to partitions by name (for instance /dev/sda1). This has pros and cons compared to using UUIDs, and as external USB devices are becoming extremely common we're planning to switch to UUIDs in the near future.

You underlined a very interesting problem here. I agree with Raphael, I'd much prefer to see our installers not format swap partitions rather than modifying the system configuration of other operating systems. Users of multiple systems who share the same swap area and hibernate often are probably already aware of the limitations involved in doing this, and they would be impacted not only during the installation of a system but on a regular basis as they continue to use both systems.

Our installer allows the user to choose the swap partition and whether to format it or not. I wasn't aware of the problem and I'm sure most of our users aren't either... so we'll probably add a warning when the user chooses to format the swap, or we might design the UI differently to work around this issue.

Regards,

Clement Lefebvre
Linux Mint

For manual partitioning my installer presents GParted to the user. Just going with not formatting swap presents the issue of if they decided it was too big or too small and changed it. Considering the partitioning could have been done for them using another installer using an automatic partitioning system this might not be so uncommon. This would also invalid the /etc/fstab entries for the other distributions.

For my setup I think it makes the most sense to go update the fstab entries on the hard disk for the users (Only if they answer that the swap is shared with other distributions on the disk). This would make it very hearty against any known issues, but probably won't make sense for all projects. This possible use case could also simply be covered by documentation in or around the installer.

As long as the user ends up with functioning distributions on the disk, it's all good. The method that gets them there is just the devil in the details. Seems there isn't a perfect no downsides solution for all possible use cases to fix this, but I didn't really expect one.


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