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Re: New partman-basicfilesystems debconf templates


On Jul 26, 2013, at 11:23 PM, Christian PERRIER wrote:


Hello Milan,

I noticed that you added new templates to partman-basicfilesystems for
the following:
* Warn if bootable partition is not ext2 on Pegasos machines. Closes: #717511 

I'll turn these templates to translatable (they are not, yet) and mark
them for sublevel 4 or 5 (belong to "less common" architectures).

However, before doing that, I'd like to use the same wording than
other similar templates (so that translations can be re-used).

Particularly, the following:

Template: partman-basicfilesystems/boot_not_first_partition
Type: boolean
Description: Go back to the menu and correct this problem?
Your boot partition is not located on the first partition of your
hard disk. This is needed by your machine in order to boot.  Please go
back and use your first partition as a boot partition.
.
If you do not go back to the partitioning menu and correct this error,
the partition will be used as is. This means that you may not be able
to boot from your hard disk.

We already have such a template, but it says "on the first PRIMARY
partition". Would it be wrong to add this "primary" word to the
templates you added?


I may be sticking my nose in where it's not appropriate, but...
The word "primary" refers to a peculiarity of the PC-style MBR partitioning scheme. I believe Pegasos uses a very different partitioning scheme, so adding "primary" would be incorrect and confusing.
The Wikipedia article on Pegasos -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Pegasos says, "For hard disk drive booting the [Pegasos] Open Firmware requires an RDB boot partition that contains either an affs1 or ext2 partition". Following the link to the Wikipedia article on RDB explains the differences between MBR and RDB partitioning. It says, "Because [with RDB] there is no limitation in partition block count, there is no need to distinguish primary and extended types and all partitions are equal in stature and architecture."
I don't have a Pegasos machine, so I'm just repeating what I read by Googling, but I do have a number of PowerPC Macs running Debian and I know they don't use MBR partitioning, so my interest was piqued. 

Rick
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