[Bug 1402] New: Partitioning silently fail when the disk is too small, leading to failing installation

[drift@skolelinux.org]

http://bugs.skolelinux.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1402

           Summary: Partitioning silently fail when the disk is too small,
                    leading to failing installation
           Product: Skolelinux
           Version: lenny-alpha0
          Platform: All
        OS/Version: Linux
            Status: NEW
          Severity: major
          Priority: P3
         Component: debian-edu-install
        AssignedTo: debian-edu@lists.debian.org
        ReportedBy: pere@hungry.com


The partman-auto package in lenny have changed how it handle small
disks.  Instead of reporting to the user that there is not enough
space to use the recipe the system requiested, partman-auto ignore it
with a message like "partman-auto: Expert recipe too large (X > Y);
skipping" in the syslog and fall back to create two partition for /
and swap.  The / partition is too small to contain all the package we
try to install, and the installation fail/hang during downloading or
installation.

I discovered this while trying to install the Standalone profile on an
Aspire One with 8 GB hard drive.  Apparently slightly less then 10 GB
is needed for the Standalone profile these days.

The consequence of this hcange is that users will just get too small
partitions and a failed installation, instead of a warning before or
during partitioning.

I found a related comment in 
<URL: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/partman-auto/+bug/415488 >

I suggest we add some code in debian-edu-install to detect this
situation, and pop up a dialog box stating that "the disk is too small
for the selected profiles, please try again", and reboots the
installation when the user press <OK>.

The detection could be done using

  grep 'partman-auto: Expert recipe too large' /var/log/syslog

and I suspect a pre-base-installer.d script would be a good place to
do it, unless someone know a hook in partman we can use instead.

I would really like to show this dialog before the partition table is
changed, if at all possible, to avoid doing any destructive changes
when we know the installation is not going to succeed.

Setting severity to major, as this is a usability issue that can lead to a lot
of user support request when they try to install Debian Edu on netbooks.


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