Bug#172244: Problem using ext3

[Pete Ryland <pdr@pdr.cx>]

On Mon, Dec 09, 2002 at 01:51:13AM +0100, Tollef Fog Heen wrote:
> * Pete Ryland 
> | 'Load installer modules' would be confusing to a newbie.  IMO, this should
> | be made simpler to understand - maybe even removed.  I didn't need any
> | modules anyway. :)
> 
> Huh?  You did have to download the extra modules to be able to mkfs,
> partition and such?

Well, I didn't have to manually select any extra ones is what I meant.

> | I was able to partition my drives to ext3 and mount them, but what I failed
> | to realise for a bit was that they weren't actually mounted since ext3
> | wasn't in the kernel and wasn't there as a module.  HOWEVER, the
> | installation still proceeded to install without having the devices mounted!
> 
> This is bad, but I wonder why the kernel didn't pick up the ext3.
> Perhaps this is the cause of some strange errors I've seen where ext3
> hasn't worked.  It seems like the default kernel doesn't support ext3,
> a bug has been filed to correct this.
> 
> Also, di-utils-mount-partitions should fail if it can't mount the
> partition; I don't know why this didn't happen; mount failing should
> have caused the postinst to fail.  (We should probably say something
> like ?We tried to mount $partition, but failed, perhaps the kernel
> doesn't support the file system?.)

It created a directory, then tried to load the module for ext3, which it
couldn't find, but didn't notice that it hadn't mounted.  However, when I
went to mount the next partition, "/" was still the default place to mount
it at, so I guess there was some part that understood that it wasn't
mounted, but I don't remember that being reported until the ramdisk ran out
of space.

Another thing I noticed (and I hope you don't mind this being in the same
bug report) is that I asked the floppy installer for sarge but when it came
to rebooting and the main package installation, it decided I wanted stable,
a showstopper for a newbie since coreutils from stable clashes badly with
fileutils from sarge (they both include '/bin/date').

Pete